Vacation

I'll be on vacation next week with no access to a computer. Back on Aug. 8.

In the meantime, here is a random list of 25 songs off of my IPod to fill the rest of this space:

Moonlight Becomes You - Bing Crosby
Love or Confusion - Jimi Hendrix
I'll Be Seeing You (In All The Old Familiar Places) - Bing Crosby
Tombstone Blues - Bob Dylan
Slither - Velvet Revolver
If I Can't Have You - Bee Gees
Body and Soul - Coleman Hawkins
Soul Kitchen - The Doors
Pardon Me - Incubus
Rockin' Chair - Louis Armstrong
This Little Girl of Mine - Ray Charles
Lester Leaps In - Count Basie Orchestra
We're An American Band - Grand Funk Railroad
Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams - Bing Crosby
That'll Be The Day - Buddy Holly
You Make My Dreams Come True - Hall & Oates
She's No Lady - Lyle Lovett
Runnin' With The Devil - Van Halen
Good Vibrations - Beach Boys
Dreamtime-Shake It Up - John Waite
Don't Be Cruel - Elvis Presley
Walk On - U2
Riverboat Shuffle - Frankie Trumbauer Orchestra featuring Bix Biederbecke
You Got Lucky - Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
Oye Como Va - Santana

Why we went to war

Over at TPMCafe today, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson goes point-by-point through the lies and deceptions being propogated by the GOP to cover up their complicity in the Valerie Plame scandal.

FACT 1--Valerie (Plame) Wilson was undercover and occupied a sensitive position.

FACT 2--Valerie (Plame) Wilson's relationship with the CIA was not known until revealed by Robert Novak's column.

FACT 3--Valerie Plame Wilson did not send her husband on the trip to Niger.

These are things that should be obvious to anyone living in the “reality-based community” as opposed to the fantasy world inhabited by most Bush apologists these days.

But the thing I found most interesting was a discussion by one of the commenters trying to understand the real motivation behind the Bush administration’s rush to war in the first place.

I've been thinking bsout this for a while trying to come up with a plausible reason.  My first assumption is that nothing we have been told so far is it: Building Democracy in Iraq?  Please, Cheney barely tolerates democracy here, he could give a rats ass about it in Iraq.  There has to be a real politik reason; Cheney, Rumsfeld - these guys cut their teeth under Kissinger.  WMD?  If anything the Bush admin knew better than anyone that they didn't exist.  Oil?  Sure it is about oil, everything in the Middle East is, but still why invade?

Here is the scenario that I think makes sense, assuming that Bush, Cheney et al aren't total fools this is my guess as to what happened:

1) The stuff we did in the 90s (bombings and so on) was more effective at destroying Sadaam's WMD capabilities than we realized.

2) It was very much in Sadaam's interested to make sure that no-one realized this. His power rested on both Iraqis and his neighbors thinking he was still strong.

3) After 9/11 the CIA, State Department and UN started looking at Sadaam more closely and began to see how much of a paper tiger he was. (Both Kay and Blix have said they knew he had no WMD)

4) Everyone in the Bush admin who looked into this realized it too, the CIA and State department working independently came to the same conclusions.

5) Sadaam called Bush's bluff and said the inspectors could come in. The last thing Bush wanted was for the inspectors to prove once and for all that Sadaam was toothless.

6) Hence the rush to war.

7) The real motivation for the war wasn't that Sadaam was strong and a threat; it was just the opposite, he was becoming too weak! We need a balance of powers in the Middle East - Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Saudia Arabia.

8) The plan was to quickly topple Sadaam, put Chalabi in power and have a new, more reliable ally as our counterweight to Iran (remember we backed Sadaam in the war with Iran).

9) That blew up in their faces, both because they didn't prepare for the aftermath and didn't understand just how much of a mess Iraq's infrastructure had become.

10) What also didn't help is that Chalabi was playing them for fools while secretly working for Iran.

Ultimately I can see a valid motive here, allowing Iraq to disinigrate into chaos as Sadaam crumbled from within would leave it ripe for take over by Iran. But here is the thing, by doing it the way they did they totally lost any chance of success. The likely end result is now Iraq aligned with Iran, with at best an independent Kurdistan in the north aligned with Turkey (how ironic is that? The thing Turkey most feared may now very well be in their best interest! Losing a little territory along the border and their Kurdish citizens may be worth having another staunchly secular regime with decent Oil revenue opposed to Iran as a neighbor).
If we had waited for Sadaam to crumble under the weight of his own corruption and Iran tried to move in to the void we could have put together a coalition of Arab states to join us in protecting Iraq from the Persian aggressors.

A very interesting analysis. I don’t agree with it entirely, but it makes a lot of very valid points.
I think there is no question that the timing had mostly to do with the Republican’s desire to have the public perception that they were taking a strong and aggressive stand against terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. This was especially important on the eve of the 2002 mid-term elections when Republicans were trying to regain control of the Senate. And once they committed to that aggressive course of action they set the ball rolling on a track where they could not turn back without undermining that desired public perception. Backing down in any way and allowing U.N. inspectors to prove that there were no WMDs would have been seen as a political victory for Democrats who were challenging Bush’s post-9/11 leadership in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election.
Supporting the war became a political imperative and at that point the truth became expendable. Intelligence that supported the war scenario was thrust front and center regardless of how shaky its credibility (i.e. the centrifuge tubes, the mobile bioweapons lab, etc.) while intelligence that ran contrary was ignored and/or refuted vigorously - which of course is what led to the outing of Valerie Plame’s identity.

GOP selling pork for votes

In yet another ugly display of arm-twisting, bribery and threats, House Majority Leader Tom “The Hammer” DeLay assured passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) last night by holding the vote open 47 minutes past the traditional 15-minute deadline.

The 217 to 215 vote came just after midnight, in a dramatic finish that highlighted the intensity brought by both sides to the battle. When the usual 15-minute voting period expired at 11:17 p.m., the no votes outnumbered the yes votes by 180 to 175, with dozens of members undeclared. House Republican leaders kept the voting open for another 47 minutes, furiously rounding up holdouts in their own party until they had secured just enough to ensure approval....

This sounds awfully similar to the bribery and threats that the GOP used to pass its Medicare boondoggle last year.
We may not know right away (or ever) if House members were threatened the way they were during the Medicare vote, but it is clear that bribery was on the table.

The last-minute negotiations for Republican votes resembled the wheeling and dealing on a car lot. Republicans who were opposed or undecided were courted during hurried meetings in Capitol hallways, on the House floor and at the White House. GOP leaders told their rank and file that if they wanted anything, now was the time to ask, lawmakers said, and members took advantage of the opportunity by requesting such things as fundraising appearances by Cheney and the restoration of money the White House has tried to cut from agriculture programs. Lawmakers also said many of the favors bestowed in exchange for votes will be tucked into the huge energy and highway bills that Congress is scheduled to pass this week before leaving for the August recess.

Remember how Republicans were supposed to restore integrity and honesty to government back when they took control away from entrenched Democrats? Yeah, me neither.

Easy Rider

My brother-in-law who is serving with the Louisiana National Guard in Iraq is scheduled to come back home in November. His wife (my sister) has promised to let him get a Harley-Davidson when he gets back which will become his primary mode of transportation to and from work. She and the four kids have laid claim to his truck during his absence.
As you can see from this photo, he is already eagerly anticipating the new “Easy Rider” lifestyle he will be adopting when he gets back stateside.

Quagmire update

John Derbyshire over at NRO is one conservative who occassionaly makes sense - and thus makes his ideological cohorts uncomfortable. Here he is today making a salient point about the unexpected length of Bush’s war in Iraq:

...it is a fact that no American, in March 2003, thought we would have a huge army planted in Iraq 2 and a half years later. The administration did not even hint at such a possibility...

Our war against the Empire of Japan, 1941-45, lasted 1,347 days. The current war in Iraq, against a rabble of Arab hooligans, has lasted 861 days. If it lasts as long as WW2, it will end on November 25 next year. Do you really think it will have ended by then? Do you really think that Zarqawi and his gangs are as formidable an enemy as the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces? Do you really believe we are doing this right? Really?

Cheap Sunglasses

Ray-Ban
Originally uploaded by mwthomas87.

I would like to thank the person who left his Ray-Ban sunglasses at the Sears Parts & Service Center in College Station, Texas about 17 years ago.
I was working there that summer while finishing college and found the glasses on the counter. I placed them on a shelf underneath the register and there they sat for the next several weeks. Eventually, I claimed them for my own.
They are really nice sunglasses - smokey black lenses and a wire frame that wraps around your ears to hold them in place - much more expensive than I could have afforded back then.
Up until that point I was never able to hold on to a pair of sunglasses longer than a couple of months before I would lose them. I probably went through a dozen pair of cheap, $5 sunglasses before I latched on to this pair and never let go. The fact that I still have these glasses after 17 years is quite amazing to me. I’ve always assumed that if I had bought them myself I would have lost them long ago.
Funny how that works.
Today they are a bit worn and one of the lenses pops out on occasion, but I dare not let them go. It’s not like I found these glasses, after all. It’s more like they found me.

Accepting the challenge

Nigel Tufnel
Originally uploaded by mwthomas87.

I’ve picked up the gauntlet that has been thrown down over at All Things Conservative. I’ve been having a lengthy and spirited debate (scroll down to comments) with Nigel Tufnel, the lead guitarist for Spinal Tap, over whether Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert agent with the CIA at the time that she was outed by high-level officials in the Bush administration.
I outlined my argument here, and Nigel has challenged my logic as being faulty. We have been going round and round for a couple of days and now he has offered the following challenge:

Here's a deal -- and Bill can vouch for my trustworthiness.

If Rove is indicted and convicted of a crime related to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, I will author a post on Rhetoric & Rhythm fully conceding my erroneous understanding of the act and of Rove's crime and fully acknlowledging your brilliant analysis.

If Rove is indicted but not convicted of a crime related to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, indicted for any lesser charge (to include obstruction of justice, of which he may very well be guilty), or not indicted for anything at all, you will author a reciprocal post on ATC acknowleding your erroneous understanding of the act and of Rove's non-crime and fully acknlowledging Bill's brilliant analysis.

I have accepted his challenge with certain provisions. I think it is possible that Rove could escape indictment and/or conviction without disproving that Plame was covert. So I offered this amended challenge on my part:

Let's say that if Rove is not indicted, or is indicted but not convicted of a crime related to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act because it is determined that Valerie Plame was not considered covert under the law, then I will author a mea culpa piece for ATC.
Or regardless of what happens to Rove, if it is determined through the course of the investigation that Plame was not a covert agent under the law, I would concede and admit that I was wrong.

We are still haggling over the details. Nigel thinks I’ve given myself too much wiggle room, but I’m willing to accept whatever determination the special prosecutor and the grand jury make regarding Plame’s covert status.

Needless to say, I am basing my position on my own non-lawyerly interpretation of the government statute that defines what a covert agent is. But I am also confident in that my position is supported by a lot of former intelligence agents who should know better than most.

The safe choice

Unless somebody turns up a photo of John Roberts dressed in women’s lingerie and spike heels while being spanked by his dominatrix, it is highly unlikely that his confirmation to the Supreme Court will see much turbulence.
While I imagine there will be a large number of Democrats who will vote against Roberts on principle, I think they are not likely to launch a filibuster unless something very sinister suddenly turns up to tarnish Roberts’ squeaky clean image.
Earlier I had advised Bush to pick a conservative out of the 90 percent pool of acceptable nominees and not the 10 percent of far-right nutjobs who would be sure to spark a confirmation fight. Now it seems as if Bush took this advice - sort of - and went with the most extreme conservative he could find in that 90 percent segment. Roberts may be the most conservative jurist who did not prompt a filibuster fight with Democrats.
I think it is interesting that Bush decided to break precedent by not choosing a woman to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the high court. When Thurgood Marshall, the first black jurist, retired, Bush Sr. opted to replace him with another black judge, although his ideological opposite. But Bush Jr. decided not to replace the first female jurist with another woman leaving Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the only female on the nine-member court. That could change, of course, if William Rehnquist still steps down later this summer as expected.
There is still much to be learned about John Roberts and initial opinions will likely change, but right now it looks as if Bush made a safe choice by picking the most conservative person he could find who would not spark an all-out confirmation battle.

Important questions

Now that we know who Bush's nominee is for the Supreme Court it is time to start asking the important questions.

Has he ever smoked marijuana?
Did he pay Social Security taxes for his nanny and his housekeeper? What about the gardener and the pool boy's immigration status?
Did he ever dodge the draft?
Has he ever cheated on his wife or been otherwise unfaithful in his marriage?
Did he ever sexually harass a female subordinate?
Has he ever bounced a check or failed to pay his taxes on time.

These and other important questions will have to be addressed before we can be sure that this is the right person to fill lifetime appointment on the highest court in the land.

Rove's Last Stand

Rove's Last Stand
Originally uploaded by mwthomas87.

This is courtesy of Billmon

Too funny.
But reinforcements may be on the way! Is that a Supreme Court nominee coming over the horizon just in time to distract the ravaging hordes?

Killing the innocent

For the first time it looks like the government may be about to own up to the fact that a man was executed for a crime he did not commit.

... 25 years ago ... a 19-year-old drug dealer named Quintin Moss was gunned down from a slow-moving car... And the man convicted of the killing, Larry Griffin, was executed 10 years ago.
Yet the city's top prosecutor has decided to re-investigate the murder as if it just happened, out of new concerns that the wrong man may have been put to death for the crime.
...
should Ms. Joyce, the St. Louis circuit attorney, demonstrate Mr. Griffin was not the killer, as the report and even some members of the victim's family contend, it would be the first proven execution of an innocent person, so far as death penalty advocates or opponents can recall.

This would be a significant step in the debate over capital punishment. It is surely not the first time that an innocent person has been executed by our justice system, but it would be the first time that such an outcome has been officially acknowledged.
Still, it is important to remember that for true opponents of the death penalty the killing of innocents is only part of the problem. The death penalty is wrong even when its target is definitely guilty of the crime. Jesus did not insist on seeing proof that Mary Magdalene was innocent of the prostitution charges levied against her before he challenged the mob to let someone without sin cast the first stone.

Once a covert operative...

How does one stop being a covert operative for the CIA? I mean other than having Karl Rove leak your name to the media?
The truth is that one can never stop being a covert operative without exposing all of your intelligence sources to the possibility of retaliation and undermining any and all of your past covert activities.

One of the lamest, but apparently popular, defenses of Karl Rove being bandied about by Bush apologists lately is that there could not have been a crime committed in this case because they claim that Valerie Wilson was not a covert operative at the time that her name was leaked to the media. In fact, they go on, she had not been working overseas for more than five years by that point and therefore no longer met the definition of a covert agent. To bolster this claim they point to this definition of a covert agent in the National Security Act of 1947:

The term “covert agent” means—
(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency—
(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and
(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States...

I want to call your attention to the comma in the above sentence that immediately precedes the ‘and’ in the (i) sub-definition. By placing the comma there it means the next portion of the sentence is a separate thought and is not needed to understand the meaning of the preceding portion of the sentence. But conservatives reading this definition have conveniently ignored the comma and treat the ‘and’ as meaning that the two segments must be combined to complete the meaning.

This is crucial because with the comma the definition is more inclusive and has a broader scope of what a covert agent is - including agents whose identity is classified as well as agents who works overseas now or in the past five years. Without the comma the definition can be read more exclusively to limit it to agents who meet both criteria - their identiy is classifed AND they must have worked overseas in the past five years.

Now this latter definition is not only incorrect, but would also be detrimental to our nation’s intelligence gathering capabilities. Imagine a rule that says after five years of inactivity information on our covert intelligence agents is suddenly part of the open record and “fair game” for anyone who wants to disseminate it in the mass media. The people who are positing this interpretation are either not thinking it through clearly (and to be charitable that is what I assume for most of them) or they are complete idiots.

So let’s stop and think about this a little bit more. If we really had such a thing as a five-year statute of limitations on protecting our covert agents and it could be clearly demonstrated that Valerie Wilson has not been actively working overseas for at least five years, then it would seem to be an open and shut case. So please explain why the Justice Department has spent the better part of two years and millions of taxpayer dollars pursuing this case. Because if that is the case then the only real scandal is why the special prosecutor is wasting our time and resources (not to mention throwing journalists in jail).

The truth of the matter is that Valerie Wilson was a covert agent at one time as this article makes clear:
 
The investigation was triggered when CIA lawyers asked the Justice Department to look into who revealed the identity of Wilson’s wife, who worked overseas under deep cover posing as a private industry energy analyst.

And the fact that she recently took time off to raise a family and had not been overseas in the past five years (assuming that is the case) is beside the point.
Plus, it is also highly likely that she was able to continue working as a covert agent while stateside by keeping in contact with her foreign sources via telephone and e-mail.

But all of that is now lost thanks to loose-lipped Karl Rove. Once he decided to fire up his signature smear operation against Ambassador Joseph Wilson he wasn’t about to let a little thing like our nation’s national security interests get in the way of his scoring political points against a critic of the administration.

Blaming the media

So Karl Rove is supposedly claiming that Plame’s CIA identity was just some rumor that had been floating around in the press corps? Some gossip he overheard and then passed along innocently to a national newspaper columnist?

Rove testified last year that he remembers specifically being told by columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of a harsh Iraq war critic, worked for the CIA.

How interesting. But that’s not what Novak has said:

Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

I wonder who has been lying to the Grand Jury, Rove or Novak?

So far this case has been exciting a lot of commentary from the local blog community.

Eddie Rodriguez at The Red State has been working hard to debunk the avalanche of spin coming out of the White House on this issue.

The other day Bill Crawford at All Things Conservative helpfully reprinted the GOP “talking points” that try to smear Ambassador Joseph Wilson by repeating a lot of lies and misrepresentations of things he has said in the media. What exactly this has to do with the outing of his wife as a CIA agent I’m not sure. Perhaps they believe that the public will think that it is OK to expose our CIA operatives’ identities as long as their relatives’ reputations have been adequately besmirched first.
Josh Marshall sums it up pretty well here.

Now today, Bill is jumping all over the strange “Rove blames media” story claiming it completely vindicates him and puts the onus on Democrats for ever criticizing poor Rove in the first place.
But over at B & B Peter Bryant gives us a different analysis of the same story:

If we believe the Rove-friendly account in today's papers, someone had already spread around Plame's CIA job to both Novak and Rove. Who? Rove, by the account in the Washington Post, has conveniently forgotten.
If we don't believe the Rove-friendly account, then this timing is extremely suspicious.

Congrats to Peter on having his piece cross-posted at TPM Cafe.

For those who desperately want to believe Rove’s story that some reporter was responsible for outing Plame first there is still one big question that must be answered - How did a journalist with no security clearance get ahold of this classified information in the first place? And how convenient that they should happen to get it right at a time when it helps the White House in their effort to damage the credibility of a top critic of their Iraq policy.

Losing confidence

The Wall Street Journal poll that is out today has Bush down to a 46 percent approval rating with 52 percent saying the country in on the wrong track.
The Journal says that Bush's standing has been hurt by Iraq, his Social Security privatization scheme, and most recently by the Karl Rove scandal. The Journal story further warns that Bush "faces further political peril" if his Supreme Court nominee becomes embroiled in a protracted partisan battle.

Meanwhile, in another WSJ story we learn that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is spending more and more of his time focused on Karl Rove and what he told Time reporter Matthew Cooper. I think an indictment is almost inevitable at this point.
I expect to hear Bush announce soon that he has "full confidence" in Rove, which is always a sure signal that someone is about to get axed.

Even if Rove stays though, Democrats are trying to raise the heat index on him by pushing legislation to revoke his security clearance. Imagine if the president's top aide had to excuse himself everytime any confidential security matter was being discussed. At least Rove can always take a job with the Journal's editorial board where they are waiting to give him a medal for blabbing about one of our CIA operatives.

The Ideal Supreme Court candidate

Judge Sonia Sotomayor
Originally uploaded by mwthomas87.

Here is Bush’s ideal Supreme Court nominee. A Hispanic female with lots of judicial experience who was first appointed to the bench by Bush’s father. Plus she is guaranteed to have an easy confirmation.

Of course, this presumes that Bush wants an easy confirmation process. But there are many reasons why he would rather appoint someone more extreme and provoke a fight. First, it would satisfy his base of extremist religious right fundamentalists. Second, it would distract the public’s attention away from the mess in Iraq, Bush’s failed domestic agenda and the Karl Rove scandal.

Karl Rove: From Powerbroker to Pariah

It looks like
Ambassador Joseph Wilson was right again. Wilson pointed the finger at Karl Rove as the White House culprit who outed his wife from the CIA more than two years ago.
Now we are finding out that Rove was indeed the source for at least Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper who learned from Rove that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA more than three days before Robert Novak’s column ran exposing that fact for all the world to see.
So far the White House is is refusing to comment on the unfolding scandal.

For two years, the White House has insisted that presidential adviser Karl Rove had nothing to do with the leak of a CIA officer's identity. And President Bush said the leaker would be fired.
But Bush's spokesman wouldn't repeat any of those assertions Monday in the face of Rove's own lawyer saying his client spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified in a newspaper column.

Well, that’s OK, because Billmon has helpfully compiled a long list of relevant quotes from White House officials over the years denying Rove’s involvement. Lies, lies and more lies.

Now the only question is why Rove is still a member of the administration after Bush said long ago that he would fire whoever was responsible for the leak? Surely, Bush would not go back on his word!

I think it is just a matter of time now before Karl Rove joins Ken Lay on the list of GOP pariah’s whose name is never spoken by the president.

White House hypocrites

After chastising Democrats for suggesting that we need to set a timeline for withdrawing the bulk of our troops from Iraq, it now seems that the Bush administration has been secretly planning to do just that all along.
A secret memo uncovered by the British media reveals that the White House is looking to pull most troops out by early 2006:

"emerging U.S. plans assume that 14 out of 18 provinces could be handed over to Iraqi control by early 2006," allowing a reduction in overall U.S.-led forces in Iraq to 66,000 troops. The troop level is now at about 160,000, including 138,000 American troops, according to a military spokesman in Baghdad.

This is good news because it means that maybe, just maybe, the Bush team is not as stupid as they have pretended to be lately. I’ve had a hard time understanding why Bush has been so stubborn about setting a timeline or even defining the terms of victory in Iraq.
The polls have shown that support for the war is plummeting the longer it drags on. Right-wingers whine that this is because the so-called liberal media hasn’t been cheerleading loudly enough on the sidelines, but the truth is that even when our subservient media bows down to the GOP agenda and obediently refuses to show pictures of the coffins and bodybags coming home, they can’t completely cover up the fact that more than 1,700 U.S. troops have been killed and more are dying everyday.
It amazes me the number of times in recent weeks where I have had casual conversations with very conservative Republicans who, upon learning that I am a liberal Democrat (quite rare in these parts), confess their reservations about the war in Iraq. They may not agree with me that we should never have gone in in the first place, but they do agree that it is high time that we started getting out.

So if pulling out would be politically popular why are they refusing to say they would even consider it? This new memo makes things a little more clear. As long as they start pulling out before the 2006 mid-term elections they can benefit from that politically. In the meantime, they can continue to blast Democrats for being terrorist sympathizers, weak on defense, cut-and-run cowards and so forth even while making plans for a massive drawdown early next year.

In fact, the White House seems to be even more anxious to pull out than their counterparts in the Pentagon, according to the memo.

The memo, posted on the newspaper's Web site, notes a debate between U.S. officials at the Pentagon and military leaders in Iraq, saying that officials in Washington favor "a relatively bold reduction in force numbers," differing with battlefield commanders, "whose approach is more cautious."

Activist judges

This Op-Ed from the NYTimes makes a great point about who the real "activists" are on the Supreme Court today.
The authors use a formula by which they determine how much of an activist each current justice is based on the percentage of times they have voted to overturn Congressional legislation.

Declaring an act of Congress unconstitutional is the boldest thing a judge can do. That's because Congress, as an elected legislative body representing the entire nation, makes decisions that can be presumed to possess a high degree of democratic legitimacy. In an 1867 decision, the Supreme Court itself described striking down Congressional legislation as an act "of great delicacy, and only to be performed where the repugnancy is clear." Until 1991, the court struck down an average of about one Congressional statute every two years. Between 1791 and 1858, only two such invalidations occurred.

Since the Supreme Court assumed its current composition in 1994, by our count it has upheld or struck down 64 Congressional provisions. That legislation has concerned Social Security, church and state, and campaign finance, among many other issues. We examined the court's decisions in these cases and looked at how each justice voted, regardless of whether he or she concurred with the majority or dissented.

Here is how the justices came out:

Thomas 65.63 %
Kennedy 64.06 %
Scalia 56.25 %
Rehnquist 46.88 %
O’Connor 46.77 %
Souter 42.19 %
Stevens 39.34 %
Ginsburg 39.06 %
Breyer 28.13 %

It is pretty clear that by this measure the "conservative" justices are more likely to intervene and strike down legislation than the "liberal" justices.
So who are the real "activists" in this case?

9/11: The Movie

I'm kind of intrigued by this future movie...

...Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone will direct a film based on the story of two police officers who were trapped in the rubble on Sept. 11, 2001.

Nicolas Cage, who won a best-actor Oscar for "Leaving Las Vegas," will star as Port Authority police Sgt. John McLoughlin. McLoughlin and fellow officer William J. Jimeno became trapped during rescue efforts after the collapse of the twin towers.

Paramount Pictures said the movie is expected to be released next year.


I can already imagine the wails of protest from the right. And while I wouldn't put it past Stone to include a less than flattering scene of Bush reading "My Pet Goat" while all hell is breaking loose, I would still argue that Stone is an excellent director who has done well with other historical fare (check out his honest and fair treatment of Tricky Dick in his film "Nixon").

My latest obsession

IPod Mini
Originally uploaded by mwthomas87.

For my birthday (I turned 40 over the weekend) my wife bought me an IPod Mini with 4 GB of memory. That’s enough to hold about 1,000 songs.
It’s like having your very own personal radio station programmed with all your favorite music that can be mixed in random order with no DJs and no commercials. I’ve been having fun trying to get mine set up with just the right mix of music.
A thousand songs is a lot and it is certainly more than enough to be carrying around on your belt loop, but when you are like me and you start out by dumping all of your Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bing Crosby and Ken Burns’ Jazz music into the IPod you suddenly find yourself having to make decisions about what to keep and what to leave off.
I’m pretty happy with what I have on it now, but I will probably be constantly fiddling with it which is half the fun anyway. Right now I have lots of music by the above folks plus lots of Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Presley, Tom Petty and U2. I don’t have enough Rolling Stones or Led Zepplin, but those are the sacrifices you must make.
Now you know what I’ve been doing in my spare time instead of blogging.