Believe it or not, the same document that reveals Samuel Alito's opposition to Roe v. Wade has an even bigger bombshell: He's opposed to a basic principle of democracy--one person, one vote.  

As pointed out by NathanNewman in a Dkos diary, in his 1985 job application, Alito himself says that he was drawn to judicial restraint in part because of the Warren Court's activism in re-apportionment--the very cases that Earl Warren himself called the most important in his tenure.  

This is a reference to two landmark cases--BAKER v. CARR and REYNOLDS v. SIMS--that together overthrew the undemocratic system that prevailed in most state legislatures, giving equal representation to underpopulated rural districts and highly populated urban districts.

This diary is a convergent response to two recent diaries. One, by Chris Bowers at MyDD, addressed the use of code words by Democratic hawks to attack other Democrats on security issues-painting them as hopelessly out of the mainstream, when, in fact, it is the hawks who are in the small minority.  However, they still control the beltway debate. The other, by Booman at Booman Tribune, was an attack on framing. My first diary responding to Booman saw him repeatedly mischaracterize what framing is, over and over and over again. In this diary, I take a different approach.  I discuss Lakoff's use of framing to articulate a different foreign policy vision-- one that actually resonates with what the American people already believe... and with proven foreign policy success. This is badly needed, because not only do advocates of withdrawal lack media access, they also lack a common framework of understanding. And that, ultimately, is what framing is all about. Messaging is entirely secondary.

Booman hates framing because he just doesn't get it.  And he just doesn't get it because he's been schooled in the one of the Western Tradition's Big Lies--the Big Lie of disembodied knowledge.

He says:

Understanding Lakoff's framing theories involves understanding basic logic. And I don't feel like giving an academic explanation of all the intricacies of symbolic logic. So, I'll just use layman's terms.

To which media girl quite rightly responded:

Thanks for the contempt

Silly me! I just don't understand logic! Goodness! That means the tarot cards are wrong?!

/sarcasm

Again, I think you're arguing with a straw man. Framing is not willy nilly manipulation.

Booman himself is operating inside a frame.  The frame of disembodied knowledge.  And as media girl quite aptly notes, it's a frame drenched in elitism.  It's also utterly wrong.

Note: This is a story republished from the current issue of Random Lengths News.  None of the details should come as news to avid readers here, but the big picture may be illuminating for someone you know, particularly in response to the "criminalizing politics" meme.  Feel free to pass on.

Recent indictments and investigations of GOP lawmakers, lobbyists and associates are only the tip of the iceberg, according to longtime observers, including current and former true believers in the GOP cause.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist pulled a Martha Stewart this June. He sold all the stock in his family's hospital chain just before the stock plummeted. He's now under investigation for insider trading by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.  The latest wrinkle--the "blind trust" he used to supposedly insulate himself from conflicts of interest wasn't so blind, after all.

Fortunately for Frist, he's not the most high-profile Republican in hot water these days.

Almost simultaneously with the web publishing her own account of her involvement in the Valerie Plame Affair, New York Times reporter Judy Miller spoke at an awards ceremony by the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC) at Cal State, Fullerton, close to Richard Nixon's childhood home. Miller presented an award to `Deep Throat,' Mark Felt, just after the keynote speech by her attorney, Floyd Abrams, who also defended The Times in the Pentagon Papers case, when the paper was somewhat at odds with a Republican Administration, rather than carrying water for one.

Deep Throat ~= Batman

Both Abrams and Miller attempted to equate her with Woodward, Bernstein and Felt as a courageous defender of the First Amendment. Both fell short. Felt's grandson, Nick Jones, who accepted the award on behalf of his grandfather, did much better with a different equation.

I went to see Serenity, Joss Whedon's film debut, yesterday.  It begins with a presentation of the official story, how Humanity left an overcrowded Earth to colonize nearby space, and found a system rich in earthlike planets and moons, how the progressive core of the more civilized planets fought and won a war against the more primitive periphery.

The scene shifts to where the story is being told, a shimmering outdoor "classroom" echoing archetypes of Golden Age Greece, with a beautiful youngish teacher, and her charges, small children, one of whom asks (paraphrase) "Why would they fight against us? Why wouldn't they want to healthy, happier and more civilized?"  There's a bit of back and forth, then one girl who's been furiously working her hand-held electronic tablet looks up and says, "We're meddlers.  People don't like to meddled with."

Who Are The Real Meddlers? on the flip...

Hurricane Katrina laid bare Bush's multiple failures as President, everything from political philosophy to inappropriate affect.  But the obviousness of Bush's failures should not distract us from the failures of America's corporate media, without which Bush could never have become President in the first place.

The striking abandonment of duty by Bush, and every politically-appointed member of his Administration dramatically underscores the enduring significance of a major story that entire corporate media has consistently bungled since day one--Bush's dereliction of duty in the Texas Air National Guard, and the evidence of a high-level coverup to protect him.

Privacy Is A Constitutional Right

This is not a zen koan.  It's a simple distinction.  The Ninth Amendment says:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

This recognizes, without naming the existence of other rights.

A high-level document from WWII has been discovered that openly admits the reason for internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII (~70% of them US Citizens) was not for national security reasons, but because of political pressure--which was mounting toward racist violence.  (Not that the violence itself concerned them.)

The handwitten note at the bottom of a letter dated July 23, 1942, by John McCloy, FDR's assistant secretary of war to Robert Patterson, undersecretary of war, (typed in the available file copies) reads:

These people are not 'internees' -- they are under no suspicion for the most part and were moved largely because we felt we could not control our own white citizens in California.

McCloy was a key player in the iternment, and a defender of it after the fact, who has been used in recent renewed attempts to justify it--and thus justify extreme measured by Bush/Cheney in destroying basic rights in the War on Terra.  The note utterly contradicts McCloy's later claims, and with it, the entire revisionist thesis.

[promoted by BooMan]

America is haunted by the ghost of its racist past. The vast majority of Americans today are not racists and are justifiably upset if they are accused of racism.

Yet, despite the absence of racists, racism persists.  Blacks earn less than whites--and not just because of poorer education. I'm talking about blacks and whites doing the same jobs, with the same level of qualifications. Adding insult to injury, white people's money goes farther. They get loans more easily, get mortgages and buy houses more easily, live in neighborhoods where retail prices are lower, etc. Middle class blacks have far less in savings than middle class whites with the same income levels.

On another front, blacks use drugs at the same rate as whites, but get arrested far more often. Of those arrested, blacks go to trial more often. Of those who go to trial, blacks are sentenced more often. At every step of the criminal justice process, blacks are treated more harshly, and are given less chance at rehabilitation, instead of punishment.  As an end result, blacks have lost the right to vote for felony convictions at rate 7 times that of whites. In fact, if there were no felony disfranchisement, Al Gore would have won Florida in 2000 by thousands of votes--despite everything done to steal the election.

I could go on and on, or I could dress this up with specific figures and links. I've done that in past. But I don't think I need to do that here and now. We all know these things are true.  

The point is not in the details here, but in the pattern--the pattern of racism without racists, the pattern of racist results without overtly racist intentions.  This pattern persists in part because most people are unaware of it--and Katrina has suddenly made them aware, if only dimly, only partially, nonetheless, it has made them aware.

Sixteen previous men have served as Chief Justice. A quick survey of all 16 shows that all of them had a more substantial public record than John Roberts. If G.W. Bush had an extraordinary record of appointing talented unknowns, then perhaps we could overlook this aberration. But with hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies scattered throughout New Orleans, trust in Bush's appointments is justifiably low.

Going Nuclear With The Stealth Candidate

After the worst week in the Bush presidency-yes, worse than 9/11-he has the audacity to up his stealth nominee to the Supreme Court into a nominee for the top seat-Chief Justice.  There were already abundant reasons to oppose Roberts for any seat on the Court. So it was completely typical for Bush to take a dubious (at best) nominee, and try to elevate him even further.  

There have been 16 Chief Justices in American history, and--as will be seen below--every single one of them had a significantly more extensive public record than this nominee.  What's more, one Chief Justice only served a single interim term, because the Senate refused to confirm him, and three other nominees withdrew because the Senate would not confirm them.  Taken all together, the historical record shows Roberts to be an extreme aberration, who should be rejected out of hand.

Frontpaged at My Left Wing.

The Argument for Religious Freedom: Part 4 in a series based on the entry for Liberalism in the Dicionary of the History of Ideas.  [Series recap w/links at end of diary]

Part 4A made seven main points:

 (1) Luther's "priesthood of all believers, though it had precursors, signaled a new departure, radically re-centering religious authority within the individual conscience.

 (2) Luther's hold on his own principle was ambiguous and contradicted by his own practice.

 (3) The extreme "relativism" of today-even to the point of post-modernist interpretations-was present at the beginning with Luther, though of course not realized.

 (4) Castellion's De haereticis, an sint persequendi, published in 1554, was the first defense of tolerance supported by explicitly liberal ideas. There are three liberal arguments Castellion advances, which we can amplify as follows:

 (5) God is merciful, and nurturant. He does not punish men for not meeting impossible standards.

 (6) We can't substitute ourselves for God. Belief must be sincere, to be acceptable to God. But only God can know who is sincere.

 (7) The spiritual condition of the believer is a prime concern. It cannot simply be trumped by claiming "true faith." All that we can do, as mortals, is to try to support one another in our own spiritual quests.

[New stuff on the flip...]

Luke 20:25:

"And he [Jesus] said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's, and unto God the things which be God's.

God: Church

Caeser: State

Pretty simple, no?

So WHAT THE FUCK IS THE PROBLEM?????

Frontpaged at My Left Wing.

The Argument for Religious Freedom: Part 4 in a series based on the entry for Liberalism in the Dicionary of the History of Ideas.

In the introductory diary, I made a series of big points. In Part 2, I made just one big point: that liberalism developed as a pragmatic response to the context of the modern state.  

In Part 3, a similar point: that liberty of conscience--starting with and centered on religious belief--emerged as a liberal value in response to historical developments.

Here we look more at the detailed working out of what has already been described more broadly-that tolerance developed first as pragmatic necessity, then as a positive principle.

On close inspection, the positive principle of tolerance was there from the beginning of the Reformation, but it was highly ambiguous, and was sharply contradicted in practice. It was only after the pragmatic necessity was realized that the positive principle firmly took root.