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Wednesday, May 25, 2005
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Dobson dissembled, backed away from earlier comparison of Supreme Court to KKK. Focus
on the Family founder James C. Dobson attempted to revise an earlier
statement in which he compared the Ku Klux Klan and the present-day
Supreme Court.
During the April 11 broadcast of the Focus on the Family radio show, which featured Mark Levin, author of Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America (Regnery, February 2005), as his guest, Dobson said:
DOBSON:
I heard a minister the other day talking about the great injustice and
evil of the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan, that roamed the
country in the South, and they did great wrong to civil rights and to
morality. And now we have black-robed men, and that's what you're
talking about.
The operative word in
Dobson's statement is "now." His reference to "black-robed men" was
clearly to the justices presently serving on the Supreme Court (except
the court's two female members,
whom he either forgot or deliberately excluded from his Klan
comparison). Moreover, during the program, Dobson limited his
discussion with Levin almost exclusively to the present-day judiciary.
But on the May 24 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes,
Dobson denied attacking the current Supreme Court, claiming instead
that he was referring only to the Supreme Court of 1857 that issued the
infamous Dred Scott decision,
which upheld the institution of slavery. His denial came in response to
co-host Alan Colmes, who confronted Dobson about his earlier statement:
COLMES:
You said this: "I heard a minister the other day talking about the
great injustice and evil of the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan,
that roamed the country in the South. And they did great wrong to civil
rights and to morality. And now we have black-robed men, and that's
what you're talking about." Are you comparing men and women -- you
didn't mention the women -- in black robes to those who wore white
robes in the Klan? Is that an analogy you're making there?
DOBSON:
No. No, Alan, I'm on the radio three hours a week. That should have
been fleshed out more if I was going to say that. The whole story there
is, I heard this minister talk about when he was young, and he grew up
in the South. And there was tremendous discrimination there and he saw
the Ku Klux Klan and what they did. And he fought against it, at
personal sacrifice.
But now that he is older, he sees wrongs being done by the court. And he went back to the 1858 [sic: 1857] decision of Dred Scott,
which declared black people not fully human. That was another form of
evil. And he was saying evil comes in either black or white, comparing
black robes or white robes.
COLMES: But you're comparing those in black robes to those in white robes, and you're comparing the Klan to judges on the court.
DOBSON: I certainly would compare the court that made the decision in Dred Scott to be tantamount to the Ku Klux Klan. They did as much damage.
[Media Matters for America]
5:05:01 PM 
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Fox Freudian slip: Asman asked Lott why a compromise was needed when "we" had the votes for the nuclear option. Responding to Sen. Trent Lott's (R-MS) suggestion that Senate Republicans had the necessary votes to invoke the so-called nuclear option and that such a step was necessary, Fox News anchor David Asman asked Lott why Republican senators compromised on the issue. Asman said why compromise "if we should have done it and if we had the votes to do it in the Senate." Asman quickly corrected himself by stating that "you guys in the Republican party" had the votes to follow through on the nuclear option.
From the May 25 edition of Fox News Live:
ASMAN: You're the chairman of the rules committee. Did Senator [Bill] Frist [R-TN] have the votes to end the filibuster?
LOTT:
I believe that he did. It would have been very close. We would have
probably gotten a 50-50 tie vote, with the vice president breaking the
tie. Perhaps we'd have had 51 before it was over. I do think it's a
rule that should be in place because what the Democrats have been doing
is not, you know, protecting a rule, they have been causing something
different. The filibusters on a serial basis, federal judicial nominees
to the appellate courts, was unprecedented for 214 years. So, to put
that rule in place to saying that it only takes 51 votes to confirm
these judges was something I thought we should do. Remember now --
ASMAN: So, Senator, if we should have done it and if we had the votes to do it in the Senate -- if you guys in the Republican Party did -- then why did you need a compromise?
LOTT: Well, you know, I would argue that we probably should have gone forward with the vote, all things considered.
[Media Matters for America]
5:04:26 PM
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Robert Schlesinger: How I Love "Customer Service" Here's what we need: A "technical support union."
Is there any major company left in the world that is even remotely
concerned with individual customer service? The answer is probably not.
Why? Because as individual consumers, we're irrelevent to them. If
companies screw me and I vow to never use their services again it makes
absolutely no difference to them.
That's why companies can pay pennies to folks in India to read
through talking points -- and call it "customer service": Because
there's no profit in customer service. If an individual doesn't like
it, what are they going to do? Go to another company? Individuals are
irrelevant at that level.
That's also why when you call "customer service" the first thing the
automated voice asks is whether you're calling from a business or as an
individual -- they want to cut out the individuals who can be ignored
from the mass-consumers who can't be. Piss off the wrong person at a
business and you might lose a serious chunk of change.
Which is why we need a "technical support union." If you were
calling technical support not as Joe Shmoe but as Joe Shmoe from TS
Local 513, it might, ahem, encourage major companies to give competent
support. - Robert Schlesinger (rschles@hotmail.com)
[The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]
5:03:12 PM
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Senators' Optimal Experiences.
I notice a fair amount of alarm on the left about Senator Lindsay
Graham's claim that the 14 Senators who reached a deal on the Nuclear
Option will now move on to negotiate a deal on Social Security. I
suppose...
[The Decembrist]
5:01:15 PM
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FBI: Newsweek was right.
Turns out Newsweek was wrong about its source, right about the story.The
American Civil Liberties Union released the memo and a series of other
FBI documents it obtained from the government under court order through
the Freedom of Information Act. "Personally, he has nothing against
the United States. The guards in the detention facility do not treat
him well. Their behavior is bad. About five months ago, the guards beat
the detainees. They flushed a Koran in the toilet," the FBI agent wrote. "The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The guards still do these things," the FBI agent wrote.
[Daily Kos]
5:00:23 PM
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The Fourth Republic Again. In 2001 I drafted, The Fourth Republic.
In it I predicted that we had entered into a period of constitutional
crisis, which would come to a head with a crisis of the monetary
system. That until that monetary crisis occured, we would have an
escalating series of reactionary erosions of the compromises on which
the Liberal Democracy (1933- ) was based upon. That just as with
previous moments of constitutional crisis, the Reactionary side would
be the first to act, since reactionaries are the beneficiaries of the
corrupt bargains of the old order, and they, consequently know who they
are.
In 2001, this was unpublishable, the world was not ready to hear it.
The filibuster deal must be seen in the context of an escalating series
of capitulations by the "whig" faction, intended to preserve the old
order at whatever cost since, and I quote them all "the alternative is
so much worse". [BOPnews]
6:05:40 AM
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© Copyright
2005
Michael Mussington.
Last update:
6/1/2005; 1:34:19 AM.
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