Disorder In the Court

Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's choice for the Supreme Court, is under fire for her comment from 2001 that she thought a wise Hispanic woman with her background could make a more informed judicial decision than a white male jurist without a similar background. Although Sotomayor has sought to clarify her statement, explaining that she meant to say her upbringing gives her a unique perspective on the bench, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich have called for her to withdraw her nomination.

This remark was unearthed just as the Supreme Court is about to visit a case in which eighteen white firemen scored high on promotional tests but had their results rendered moot because not enough blacks scored high. Sotomayor was part of three-judge panel that let the ruling stand on technical grounds without comment. The Court is likely to overturn the decision, and it will likely ignite a debate over affirmative action.

Sotomayor may very well be enduring unfair treatment due to the fact that, while flame throwers like Limbaugh, Gingrich and Sean Hannity have the opportunity to mouth off on the issue of the Sotomayor nomination every day, Sotomayor herself hasn't been given enough opportunity to make a case for herself. Though her comments and this ruling has drawn blood, I still expect her to be confirmed. It helps that she's as wise as the hypothetical Hispanic woman of which she spoke, while the white men she's angered are fools.

Fumes

It's done. General Motors, once the greatest industrial colossus on the planet, is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy tomorrow. When the smoke clears, Pontiac will have been shuttered, several plants will be closed, and Opel - the Old World jewel in GM's crown - will be sold to a Russo-Canadian consortium (??????????) involving the Russian automaker GAZ and the Canadian auto parts manufacturer Magna.

Although it's sad to see a company that has made such wonderful cars end up like this, I can't help but feel a little glee in GM's predicament. The company has behaved like a bully for so long, using its influence to bend laws and federal policy to its own advantage, from buying streetcar lines and tearing them up to make people buy their products to opposing various safety and emissions regulations. The General could only rig the game for so long, but when they unexpectedly got competition from German and then Japanese automakers who knew how to reset the rules of the market on their terms, GM first failed to respond, then fought back with product that turned out to be inferior, and proved to be ineffective in reforming its business practices.

I obviously feel sorry for the workers who will be affected, but I don't really pity the top brass that allowed this to happen.

Okie Dopey

I wish the credit card reform bill that President Obama signed last week hadn't been passed in its final form. Although it speeds up reforms by implementing them by February 2010 - five months earlier than planned - prohibits interest rate increases during the first year of a customer's contract with the creditor and restricts rate increases on purchases already made, I wish this bill hadn't been passed as is. This is in spite of a federally mandated 45-day notice for rate increases on future purchases and limits fees and penalty interest. Why do I regret the passage of this bill with all of this in its favor?

Because it allows guns in our national parks!

WHAT?????????? Tom Coburn, a Republican senator from Oklahoma and without question the worst currently serving U.S. Senator in Washington - he infamously proposed executing abortionists after Roe v. Wade is overturned - attached a rider that allows people to carry loaded firearms - rifles, shotguns, even semiautomatic weapons - into national parkland, overturning a regulation that requires guns to be unloaded and in plain sight. Coburn's toxic rider was included despite its irrelevance to credit cards and opposition from park rangers and former national Park Service directors. Now guns will be allowed in Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and even the new national memorial dedicated to the victims of United Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 when passengers revolted against hijackers planning to plow that plane into the U.S. Capitol. So, Shanksville - the one place where a hijacked plane on 9/11 killed no one on the ground - could witness fatal gunplay thanks to Tom Coburn, a man who makes his fellow Oklahoman, global-warming-denier Senator James Inhofe, look like Robert Taft by comparison.

This even allows people to pack a rod at the Gettysburg battlefield - Gettysburg, where the guns last fell silent in 1863.

So the good news is, you can take that trip to Yellowstone on your Visa and not worry about paying it off. The bad news is, you may get shot there.

I can't believe a state with as many chuckleheads as Oklahoma got celebrated in a Broadway musical.

Brent Wilkes?

Recently, Brent Wilkes, spokesman for the League of United Latin American Citizens, came out in favor of the appointment of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

I couldn't believe it.

A Hispanic rights organization has a guy named Brent Wilkes as its spokesman?

Brent Wilkes?

Sort of having a guy named Stanislaw Romanowski as a spokesman for the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

Brent Wilkes?

Sotomayor's Paper Trail

Among the rulings of designated Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

She upheld the rule prohibiting foreign family planning organizations receiving federal money from performing or supporting abortions.

She threw out claims by white firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut that they were discriminated against they hadn't been promoted because black firemen had not qualified. This case goes to the Supreme Court next month.

She ruled in favor of prison inmates practicing the Santeria religion (a faith I only heard of today!) who sued wishing to have the right to wear religious beads in jail. This puts her in line with Samuel Alito, who as a federal judge in Newark, New Jersey, upheld the rights of Muslim policemen to keep their long beards. Sotomayor also struck down a ban on a Hannukah display in a public park in White Plains, New York.

She supported environmentalists in ruling that the Clean Water Act does not allow cost to be considered in deciding to how ensure clean water.

She sounds mainstream to me. She's a liberal, yes, but certainly not the second coming of William O. Douglas. Republican senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, no liberal, sees no major hurdles for Sotomayor. Nevertheless, I fear that some right-wing groups will try to smear her. I especially fear that morons like Sean Hannity will make Sotomayor look so radical, people will think she belonged to Omega 7.

In fact, abortion opponents are already at it. Despite her ruling supporting the right of the federal government to have a "gag rule" on abortion - a position also favored by David Souter - the anti-abortion group Americans United For Life called her "a radical pick that divides America." Thus once again, when it comes to intelligent debate on public issues and on the role of the judiciary, America is the remedial student in a classroom full of valedictorians.

It's Sotomayor!

President Obama made a less than surprising choice for the Supreme Court today with Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina jurist who has served as a prosecutor, corporate lawyer, trial judge and an appeals court judge. She also was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

As the daughter of a poor Puerto Rican family from the South Bronx, Sotomayor is a slam dunk for Obama, and not just because she is the first Hispanic appointee as well as the third female appointee. She has very little in her background to indicate that she would be a far-left activist jurist, except that she would take people's personal life experiences into account and has been shaped by her own - not something conservatives want to bother with when interpreting the law. But, as one National Public Radio analysis has suggested, the GOP is going to look awfully churlish going after a Latina appointee to the Supreme Court when they are trying to woo enough Hispanics to the party to remain competitive. And the Republican Senate caucus is so overwhelmingly white and male that they'll look even more narrow-minded trying to nail her on key issues.

In any case, this story is yet to be played out. Meanwhile, Hispanics are very proud of Sotomayor's nomination, and they should be. She seems like a fair person. Not so Samuel Alito, the most recent addition to the Supreme Court and who has sided almost consistently with the Court's rabidly conservative, anti-progressive bloc. Even though Alito is an Italian-American, I, as someone who's half-Italian, can't speak well of him. Nor can I speak well of him despite the fact that he's from my hometown.

I probably won't be welcome at a local Columbus Day picnic sponsored by Unico for having said that, but they wouldn't invite me anyway if they knew what I thought of Columbus.

Record Sampling

I've heard a lot of stories about how brick-and-mortar record stores are in trouble from not only Internet sales of compact discs but also computer downloads. I usually paid these gloom-and-doom reports no heed, because I figured that there were enough people who enjoyed the thrill of looking in record stores and finding that forgotten album they'd meant to buy years before, or perhaps finding an album they'd only heard of and never heard anything from and taking a chance on it, or just getting something out of the blue through serendipitous browsing. Now I may have to rethink my position.

A few weeks ago I visited Rush's MySpace site and listened to their second album, Fly By Night, in its entirety, and I enjoyed it despite the fact that it got only one out of five stars from the second edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide. (And the reviewer was a rare critic that liked Rush!) It suddenly dawned on me that I had heard an entire long player, with the songs sequenced properly, on my computer without having paid a cent for it - and I can listen to those tracks again and again if I so desire.

This called into question all of the albums I have bought on CD in the past twenty years. I have over a hundred of them, but I haven't listened to some of them in ages. Although I enjoy having the Clash's London Calling or Creedence Clearwater Revival's Pendulum at my fingertips whenever I am ready to hear them again, it seems far more economical to go to an artiste's social networking page and listen to the whole damn album without buying it and without having to find space for it. My PC has freed me of ever having to buy a CD again!

However, I'll still buy them, though, because CDs offer two advantages that computers don't. First, you don't have to boot up your PC just to listen to a record. Secondly, physical, tangible audio recordings - even CDs, with their precious little booklets - offer more enjoyment with their artwork and liner notes than just listening to the same tracks on a PC. And compact discs offer bonus tracks - especially essential for LPs from British acts from the sixties and seventies who kept singles and albums separate and had no idea that future recording formats would be long play only. I discovered Family's singles, among them the most essential of their work, through the magic of bonus tracks. Indeed, there's something magical about a recording you can hold in your hand that will last for years, while a recording on your computer is just electronic code that can get wiped out.

Actually, I'm glad I heard Rush's Fly By Night on the computer first, because it gave me the opportunity to give it a test run and see if I liked it. So, having liked it in spite of the aforementioned bad rating it got, I now hope to buy it on CD - and find something else while in the store or even at Amazon.com - and appreciate it all the more on my CD player, where all I have to do is just load and press play.

And without a computer to tend to, I'll have the freedom to play air guitar to Alex Lifeson's solos. :-D

GM On the Brink

General Motors is going to declare bankruptcy. There's no way around it. They're in such dire straits, they may even lose Opel in Europe. Pontiac is as good as gone here. And the Chevrolet Volt is too damn expensive to produce.

Oh yeah, and bond holders won't forgive General Motors's $27 billion debt.

Many mass transit and environmental advocates have long lamented that, after GM tore up the streetcar lines, backed the construction of expressways, and fought various pollution standards, no one was ever able to find a way to rein the company in.

I believe someone has done that.

Inconvenient Terror Truths

I was going to write a blog entry on the Riverdale terror plot in the Bronx and talk about how Americans should worry about native-born Islamic radicals as much as worry about foreign ones getting into the country, how treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem gets better results, how we have to arrest them over here even if we try to fight them over there, and how we should be more vigilant at what goes on in our own backyards.

Except the facts don't seem to back up any of that.

The four men arrested in New York for plotting attacks on synagogues in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and firing a missile against a military plane makes for a heck of a story - and, as the New York Post proved, incendiary copy - but it turns out that, once again, the federal government has caught "terrorists" that can barely operate a forklift, let alone carry out a terror plot.

One newspaper notes that the ringleader, James Cromitie, is a pot-smoking high school dropout, co-defendant Laguerre Payen was on antidepressant medication and was illiterate, and that none of the four men were cognizant enough to realize that the FBI agent who nabbed them was not the weapons dealer he claimed to be - and was in fact leading them into a trap.

One of them couldn't even keep his pants on in court.

The entire case is based largely on the alleged gang's association with the unidentified FBI informant; all anyone knows about this agent is that he or she pleaded guilty in 2002 to a fraud scheme, according to this paper.

Like the "mind control" cult in Miami that had allegedly planned to blow up the Sears (now Willis) Tower in Chicago, this gang of four apparently is too dunderheaded even to incapacitate an Olympic figure skater. But you probably won't hear that from the American mainstream media.

I learned all of this from the Canberra Times, a paper in Australia.

Will Dick Cheney Ever Shut Up?

For weeks, Dick Cheney, the former - underline former - Vice President, has been criticizing and sometimes just blasting President Obama for his policies toward terror suspects, saying that Obama's misguided policies (respect for the Constitution, understanding of the law, valuing human rights) have made us less safe and more prone to a terrorist attack. Today President Obama reiterated his position on his plan to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, insisting that no detainees will be released in the continental U.S. and that all of them would be jailed in maximum security prisons where the number of escapees can be counted on zero fingers. As for how to proceed with prosecuting and handling these detainees, Obama said that George Walker Bush left a mess by setting up this detainment system in the first place and not thinking it out properly.

That didn't stop Cheney from bringing up all of the red-herring arguments that the Bush White House never tortured anyone, that the previous administration got information on terror plots that were foiled (none of which were realistic or plausible), and that Bush saved American lives (except for the five thousand service personnel or so killed in Iraq). Cheney even suggested anew that Saddam Hussein had connections to "Mideast terrorists," letting people assume he meant there was a connection the Iraqi dictator had with Osama bin Laden (there was none) and that bin Laden's organization has been deterred from planning another terrorist attack (though we've been deterred from capturing bin Laden after letting him go at Tora Bora in Afghanistan).

However, the advantage has been to Cheney and the Republicans, who got the Senate to reject funds for closing the Guantanamo Bay prison while Obama tries to work out a plan for handling the detainees. Obama hasn't gotten support from his base, either, as he has chosen to revive military tribunals for some terror suspects (although he is revamping how they would work), oppose a truth commission to investigate past treatment of the Gitmo prisoners, and has even used the previous administration's "state secrets" doctrine that claims unchecked presidential power to prevent information disclosure in court.

Obama, in a word, won no friends. He tried to stay in the middle, but there is no middle ground on this issue.

The Gitmo issue won't go away any time soon. Alas, neither will Cheney.

A Little Doesn't Go a Long Way

I'm very happy that President Obama has decided to bring fuel economy standards up to 39 miles per gallon for cars and 30 miles a gallon for light trucks, coupled with stricter emissions standards to reduce gases that cause global warming. My problem with the plan is this: Does it go far enough?

Sure, stricter fuel economy standards will give us more fuel-efficient cars, and it may well indeed reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent, but will Americans go for cars like this as long as gasoline remains cheap? Americans don't but small cars unless they have no choice or simply like small cars. Because there aren't enough Americans in the latter category, it makes sense to start reducing subsidies on gasoline and raise the gas tax to make driving more expensive, which would encourage greater usage of public transportation and lead to more compact neighborhoods and developments that take up less space. As long as cars are simply more fuel-efficient, we'll merely be burning less gas to get to the shopping mall or office park, and we'll get stuck in traffic in the process.

We need more public transportation. The Obama administration owes the country some more talk on what kind of mass transit network America needs and how to achieve it.

More Abortion Debate

President Obama delivered the commencement speech at the Catholic Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, yesterday, and because of his pro-choice stand on abortion and his support for stem cell research, several people opposed to the idea of him at Notre Dame acted as if the Vatican had been destroyed.

Obama delfected the criticsm, addressing the abortion issue head-on and urging people on both sides of the debate to work together on reducing unwanted pregnancies and promoting adoption. Fat chance. Both pro-choicers and pro-lifers have every reason to dig in to their respective, reflexive positions. Pro-lifers - who want to outlaw the practice of abortion in most, if not all, circumstances - can now point to a Gallup poll showing that 51 percent of all adult Americans identify themselves as pro-life for the first time since Gallup started asking that question in 1995. Right-to-lifers are, in a word, feeling their oats.

Abortion rights activists have been quick to insist that the wording of the questions encouraged such results and misinterprets them as meaning that more Americans want to criminalize abortion than keep it legal, but they can't help but feel under siege these days. After all, social liberals haven't been doing to well in courting public opinion these days. Support for gun rights is growing, too.

The abortion debate has obscured far more important debates - debates over energy policy, the solvnecy of Social Security, health care - for so long, that it's an embarrassment to this nation. Someone from Japan was once on Jim Lehrer's PBS show and pointed out that Americans wasted too much time on debating abortion - and when he did so, he was laughing. Obama can't get Americans to settle the issue once and for all, and that's no laughing matter.

By the way, there's a name for people on this continent who have chosen to settle the abortion issue and move on.

Canadians.

Happy Victoria Day. :-D

Breakdown

The latest news from Detroit, the city of lack of opportunity and of impossibility and the place where anything can go wrong (and does), is the elimination of several GM and Chrysler dealerships in the U.S. to get Chrysler out of bankruptcy and to save GM from it. Roughly forty percent of dealers representing each company are to go out of business as soon as possible.

Most of the dealerships being eliminated are small, local ones that stick to one GM or Chrysler brand, and each company hopes to cut costs on maintaining their franchises by relying on the larger dealerships. Wayne Dodge - a small dealership that handles the immediate area in Wayne, New Jersey, based in the township's Mountain View section - is one of the many small local dealers known for friendly, one-on-one service that is closing down. By cutting out local dealers - some of whom have been in business since the Wilson administration (including Chrysler-affiliated dealers who predate the company itself and probably started out selling Maxwells) - and staying with the big, impersonal dealers known more for their obnoxious radio commercials than for quality service or a strong commitment to their customers, GM and Chrysler are only proving themselves to be more out of touch with the consumer.

Either way, there'll be a whole lot fewer dealers, and thus fewer opportunities for reasonable, sound deals. A lot of customers are going to get screwed.

Meanwhile, GM is looking to sell Opel and Vauxhall to Fiat. Since these brands (Vauxhalls, sold in Britain, are just rebadged Opels with right-hand drive) are the crown jewel of GM's foreign operations, it only goes to show how far the General has fallen. To leave Europe and to sever itself from Opel's stellar engineering and design (not to mention the GM employees responsible for it) shows how diminished the once-mighty company has become.

This Cereal May Be Hazardous To Your Health

What?

You mean that Cheerios isn't the health food it's supposed to be?

And General Mills is as untrustworthy as General Motors?

A new report from the Food Drug Administration declares that eating Cheerios likely cannot lower your cholesterol 4 percent in six weeks, and its promises to lower risks of cancer and heart disease are not scientifically proven, and so General Mills is violating the law that prohibits such unsubstantiated claims on the health benefits of food products.

I've eaten Cheerios to help me reduce cholesterol.

Am I going to die? :-p

An Innocent Old Piano Man

Singer/songwriter Billy Joel turns sixty today.

Mime Under New York

My British ladyfriend Therisa Barber, also known as the Ballerina Mime of Central Park, auditioned her living statue act on Tuesday for a spot in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Music Under New York program, which allows street performers (mostly musicians) to perform in the subways with official sanctioning, at New York's Grand Central Terminal. Big deal, huh?

Well, it was a big deal. Therisa got her picture published in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post's Web site, and she got interviewed on NY1. NY1 is the local cable news channel in New York City, but to leave it at that would be like calling the Vatican a neighborhood church in Rome - this channel only reaches eight million people or so!

Plus, she appeared in an Associated Press video story covering the event, which is at the end of this post.

The voice-over reporter suggested that Therisa - the only non-musician to audition for Music Under New York this year - had an advantage of having an "eccentric" act. Well, of course Therisa is eccentric - she's British!

Anyone who knows Britishers know that that's a good thing. :-)

Margaret Warning

Jim Lehrer's news show on PBS, "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," is often derided for being stale and boring. Well, it got interesting tonight!

The dowdy Margaret Warner sat with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, in town for talks with president Obama about the perpetual crisis in Pakistan, and she peppered him with hard questions about the Taliban in the country's Swat Valley, if eliminating Talib fighters meant "killing" them (he said it did), and the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

At the end, when Warner thanked President Zardari for the interview, he acknowledged her graciously and added, "You are one tough lady!"

Margaret Warner is like a goddess to me. :-) :-D

Jim Lehrer himself was honored at an awards dinner for his career this week. Seems they honored the wrong newscaster.

RIP Dom DeLuise

Some thoughts about comedian Dom DeLuise, who died earlier this week . . .

Dom DeLuise was a naturally funny man who distinguished himself in ribald comedies such as The End and on television. He was fun to watch even in a bad movie. He had a unique gift for creating laughter with the most modest effort.

Sadly, DeLuise is as likely to be remembered for his girth as for his comedy. DeLuise battled obesity, a point not lost on the people he worked with. Consider the 1976 Mel Brooks film Silent Movie, where DeLuise's character was to give a box of chocolates to a movie producer (played by Sid Caesar), but has eaten all the candies by the time he gives him the box, leaving only the individual paper linings. An inside joke if there ever was one.

Ironically, this led to perhaps his most poignant performance as an actor. In Fatso, directed by (and co-starring) Anne Bancroft, he played a middle-aged overweight man who gets a wakeup call when his equally overweight cousin dies at 39. The picture gave DeLuise plenty of comedic material but also included some serious scenes about the curse of obesity. Bancroft got some real pathos out of DeLuise, and she - like DeLuise, an Italian-American - also produced a vivid look at the role of food and family in Italian-American life.

His best moments, though, remain his genuinely funny ones, and he loved to be laughed at as much as laughed with. One memorable stunt involved going to New Orleans and visiting the restaurant of Chef Paul Prudhomme, whom DeLuise greatly resembled, and sitting at a table while letting people think he was Prudhomme.

And both are known for their cookbooks.

Being part Italian, I felt some wind taken out of the sails of my ethnic pride. Rest in peace, Dom DeLuise. You're already missed.

Sprawl Reversal

I live for stories like this.

Home values have gotten so bad recently that a bank in Texas that acquired unsold and partially completed new houses in southern California tore them down. That's right, they razed houses that had just been raised! It was easier to do that than find buyers for them.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, sixteen houses had been for a tract on the fringes of Victorville, California, about 65 miles northeast of Los Angeles. The houses included "four finished homes with granite counter tops, whirlpool bathtubs and dual-pane windows."

High living, dude. And, in an indication of how cheap today's mass-produced tract housing really is (even the luxury units), it cost less to tear them down than to build them.

Good riddance. We have too many tract houses out in the suburbs anyway. In fact, if home values sink any more, maybe we can start tearing down not just uncompleted developments but also established subdivisions, and reclaim the land for farming. They can start with all the ugly housing developments near where I live. Let's make New Jersey the Garden State once again! :-D

Savage Ban

I've always wanted to go to the United Kingdom. I've always hoped to see the White Cliffs of Dover, travel through the Midlands countryside, eat fish and chips, enjoy the sun and sand at Paignton, explore London and Glasgow, and yes, make a pilgrimage to Abbey Road Studios, birthplace of rock albums that changed my life. The bad news is I can't do that, because I lack the time and the money to do so.

The good news is, that jerk Michael Savage can't go either.

Savage, a right-wing talk radio host known for incendiary propaganda, has been banned from the U.K. for his hateful rhetoric. Among others banned from Britain are Samir Kantar, a Lebanese man once jailed for murdering four Israelis, and Russian gangsters Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, who were sentenced to ten years in a Russian jail for their role in racially motivated killings of 19 people.

Savage complained about the band imposed on him by the Office of the Home Secretary in London, and says he's considering legal action. Of Home Secretary Jaqcui Smith's action, he said, "She's linking me with mass murderers who are in prison for killing Jewish children on buses? For my speech? The country where the Magna Carta was created?"

Gee, why could Savage possibly be banned? Maybe because it's because he called the Koran a "book of hate" and dismissed autistic children with autism by saying in "a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out" in most cases.

Flying on British Airways across the Atlantic suddenly seems less scary knowing I wouldn't have to sit next to Savage on the plane.