Here is Senator Lugar’s opening statement for Nomination Hearing of John Bolton as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. It is, in my opinion, an excellent statement and worth a read. It prompted me to forward an e-mail to Senator Lugar. (Not that I expect e-mails to elected officials do much good, but it made me feel like a citizen.) The e-mail:

Dear Senator Lugar,

I am one of your constituents and have had the pleasure of voting for you in your past two elections (my relative youth and 4 years in Ohio prevented from voting for you prior to that.) I read your opening statement with regard to hearings on the confirmation of John Bolton as U.N. Ambassador. I think you are exactly right in stating that an official such as the U.N. Ambassador should, before making a statement, consider first whether it is true, consider second whether it is consistent with the stated policies of the President and Secretary of State, and consider third whether there is a rational expectation that the statement will advance those policies. From what I have read of Mr. Bolton’s prior statements with regard to the U.N. and the international community, I do not believe he has demonstrated an ability to abide by those rules. Further, given those past statements, I believe that a confirmation of Mr. Bolton would be perceived by our allies as an insult. At a time when Mr. Bush has indicated an intent to mend relationships strained during the years of Mr. Bush’s first administration, I do not believe it is appropriate to add insult to injury. If it is politically feasible for you, as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee to act independently of the Bush administration, I would ask that you do so and vote against Mr. Bolton and lobby the President and Secretary Rice for a more diplomatic candidate. If not, I would ask that you and the Republican leadership allow Senators to vote their consciences so that this does not become merely a party line vote.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

If you care to weigh in with the Senator, his e-mail address is: senator_lugar@lugar.senate.gov

I’m getting sick of ignorant, arrogant nutjobs, some of whom unfortunately seem to be in national GOP leadership positions, trying to erode the rule of law. In case they haven’t noticed, an independent judiciary and the depth of the common law is the soil in which our Democracy grows. Or maybe that’s the point, I don’t know. You’ve got Senator Cornyn (R-Texas) suggesting that maybe that rapist in Atlanta who shot his way out of a court room was doing it because of “activist judges”. You’ve got Tom DeLay and Rick Santorum lying about the Schiavo law they passed, wrongheaded as it was it wasn’t as far reaching as they seemed to suggest, and talking about “judicial tyranny” when the Florida District Court judge followed the law and applied the accepted rules for issuing a preliminary injunction.

Now, the assault continues. Dana Milbank has a Washington Post article entitled And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty

Some choice passages:

Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said Kennedy’s opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles “is a good ground of impeachment.” To cheers and applause from those gathered at a downtown Marriott for a conference on “Confronting the Judicial War on Faith,” Schlafly said that Kennedy had not met the “good behavior” requirement for office and that “Congress ought to talk about impeachment.”

. . .

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ ” Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.”

Mr. Milbank then recounts the incidents I led with:

A judge in Atlanta and the husband and mother of a judge in Chicago were murdered in recent weeks. After federal courts spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said that “the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) mused about how a perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to “engage in violence.”

I’ve got no patience for thugs. Maybe we should put them down like the rabid dogs they are. Speaking politically and metaphorically, of course.

On the other hand, I’m probably all wrong and Fafblog has the right of it:

“Kneel before Greer!” says Florida circuit judge George Greer. I am forced to kneel on accounta Congress refuses to set limitations on his kneel-forcin powers.

“Oh you won’t get away with this judges,” says me. “Tom Delay will stop you an save the day!”

“Who is this Tom Delay?” says Judge Greer.

“Oh you’ll find out an when you do!” says me.

“Come to me, Tom Delay!” says Judge Greer. “I defy you! Come and kneel before Greer! GREER!”

The Palladium-Item is reporting that William Kristol, neocon editor of the Weekly Standard and member in good standing of the chattering classes was assaulted by a pie while engaging in a debate at Earlham College. I certainly have my reservations about Mr. Kristol’s views, but hurling projectiles during a debate is unacceptable. That seems to have been the general attitude of the audience and the college. The pie-thrower was booed and later identified and suspended. Questioners and faculty alike apologized to Mr. Kristol.

Chris Hardie has what appears to be a first hand account posted at his blog. (Thanks to kemplog for the pointer.)

Update 4/8/05Over at In the Agora Zach Wendling offers some commentary on the recent midwestern college spate of throwing food at conservative speakers: pie on Kristol at Earlham, pie on Horwitz at Butler, and salad dressing on Buchanan at Eastern Michigan. Meanwhile, Taking Down Words offers its preferred list of things to throw at conservative speakers.

For the wonky and the navel gazers, there is The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog (PDF Document) which takes a look at patterns amongst Left & Right bloggers, how they link, who they link to, what they discuss, and what their sources are.

Some graphics from the McLaughlin Group that really do a good job of summarizing why most Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction:

Walter Kirn for the New York Times writes a column entitled Magazine > The Way We Live Now: Broke” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/magazine/27WWLN.html?pagewanted=print&position=”> Broke. He describes the new bankruptcy bill as follows:

The unhappy ending is going bust, of course, and thanks to an almost certain new federal law that the president has vowed to sign, this ending is set to grow unhappier still — at least for a significant percentage of the one million to one and a half million Americans who file for bankruptcy protection every year and will, as early as this autumn, find it much harder to wipe clean their books and get back on their economic feet. For the credit-card issuers and consumer-finance companies whose well-financed lobbyists backed the bill (whose central provision requires bankrupt debtors with incomes exceeding their statewide median incomes to settle for long-term repayment plans), the results should prove more gratifying.

(I disagree with his assessment here. I don’t think this is going to result in much more income for the credit card companies. I suspect the administrative costs of keeping the accounts open through the bankruptcy will eat up most of the blood they are able to squeeze out of the turnips.)

In any event, Mr. Kirn describes the many ways in which Americans are urged to spend, spend, spend, and then, once they reach rock bottom financially, “Suddenly the same figures that urged the debtor to shop until he dropped surround his fallen body like hissing Puritans out of a Nathaniel Hawthorne fable. Garbed in steeple hats and bursting with pointed apothegms about pennies saved and rainy days, they close in with their red-hot branding irons and mark his flesh with a shy scarlet ”B,” after which they type it on a screen connected to every computer in America.”

————–
Meanwhile, Mary Deibel and Lance Gay for the Scripps Howard News Service have an article entitled Studies Find it’s getting harder and harder to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

According to the article:

Trend-watchers looking for changes in family fortunes have turned to the 40-year Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has followed the finances of more than 5,000 American families and their 65,000 members for three generations. Economists often break down income and wealth into quintiles, or one-fifth blocks of the population.

Following these families, economists Katharine Bradbury and Jane Katz of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that income mobility has declined since the 1960s. Families’ ability to move to a higher level declined in the 1980s and 1990s.

Two-wage-earner families were a major source of financial advancement starting in the late 1960s, the researchers found: “While a working wife was not necessary for a family to move ahead, having one definitely helped.”
. . .
Frank Stafford, a University of Michigan economist who oversees the panel-study program, isn’t surprised by the pessimism expressed toward the future by Scripps poll participants. “Our data show the extended dependency of children into their 30s is a real phenomenon, and these people are reflecting that real concern,” he said.

When it comes to moving up the wealth ladder, American University economist Thomas Hertz reports in “Rags, Riches and Race” that opportunity is hard to come by:

– Some 37 percent of children born to the richest 20 percent of panel-study families stayed on top.

– About 42 percent born to the poorest 20 percent wound up at the bottom where they started, and another 24 percent moved up just one rung.

– Only 6 percent of the poorest made it to the top fifth of wealth.
. . .
Despite a culture raised on the American dream, success stories may be more fiction than fact, according to sociologists Robert Perrucci, Earl Wysong and David Wright. Their work on parent-child financial changes since the 1970s concludes that your position on the class scale depends on who you and your family know and where you were educated.

“There is not very much class mobility in the United States, and there never has been,” said Wright, a Wichita State University professor. “What mobility has existed has been mostly for the people who are affluent, the people who have resources to become richer.”

Abstract Appeal — by Matt Conigliaro has an outstanding timeline of the Schiavo case and the extensive legal proceedings that have taken place over the past 7 years.

Yesterday seems to have been a slow day in Indiana politics, and the Schiavo story has so many compelling angles. So, like everybody and their dog, I HAVE AN OPINION! (Alert the media.) Anyway, I was reading an article from the Evansville Courier Press on the issue as it pertains to medicaid. I found the following three paragraphs interesting:

“At every opportunity, (House Majority Leader) Tom DeLay has sanctimoniously proclaimed his concern for the well-being of Terri Schiavo, saying he is only trying to ensure she has the chance ‘we all deserve,'” the liberal Center for American Progress said in a statement Monday, echoing complaints of Democratic lawmakers and medical ethicists.

“Just last week, DeLay marshaled a budget resolution through the House of Representatives that would cut funding for Medicaid by at least $15 billion, threatening the quality of care for people like Terri Schiavo,” according to the statement.

DeLay spokesman Dan Allen fired back: “The fact that they’re tying a life issue to the budget process shows just how disconnected Democrats are to reality.”

I don’t like what either of these guys are doing, frankly. We shouldn’t base our Medicaid funding policy on our empathy for every hardluck story that comes down the pike. That’s why the Center for American Progress is wrong. DeLay, however, is stunningly wrong when he indicates that Medicaid can be separated from the issues of life and death. People need medical care to live. Medical care costs money. No money = no medical care. No medical care = death. My judgment – DeLay loses this round. (Except for the fact that, the more they talk about Schiavo, the less they talk about DeLay’s alleged involvement in an ever expanding number of financial scandals.)

The Indy Star has an article entitled, Lugar, Bayh support Schiavo law. From the article:

Lugar “believes it’s important to allow for the due process (of Schiavo’s case),” said Mark Hayes, a spokesman for the senator. “This is a very special case, and he simply wants to make sure that all of the details are examined before any decision is made.”

“Senator Bayh and every other senator agreed to allow the federal courts to intervene in this tragic case,” said Meghan Keck, a spokeswoman for Bayh.

Neither senator was on the floor when the bill came up for a vote Sunday afternoon. Hayes said Lugar was in Florida on vacation.

I’ve gotta say, I’m extremely disappointed in Bayh and Lugar. I guess it’s a good example of hard cases making bad law. Let’s be clear about the bill that Bayh & Lugar supported. It altered federal jurisdictional rules for the parents of Terri Schiavo and only the parents of Terri Schiavo so that the federal District Court could consider whether the federal rights of Terri Schiavo had been violated. Lugar’s statement that he wants to make sure that ll of the details are examined is mindblowing. This case has been litigated for years and years. Federal judges have already been asked to overturn the state court’s decision, and declined to do so. Schiavo’s parents have had more than due process, they’ve had extraordinary process. Then Congress comes along and passes a law because they don’t like the result.

I know “science” isn’t exactly popular in the halls of power these days, but the woman is gone; her empty husk lives on because Ms. Schiavo has become central to the lives of others who fear death so much that they refuse to recognize it when it arrives. Her rights have been well looked after by the legal system. Her husband is apparently trying to carry through with her wishes as best he can.

Congress has no business tampering with well settled legal principles on a one-time-only basis for the sake of making an excruciating marital decision even more difficult. Some things just aren’t Congress’s business, and Bayh and Lugar should know better.