After three days of perfectly predictable Senate hearings, Sonia Sotomayor has emerged entirely unscathed and well on her way towards becoming the third women to ever sit on the US Supreme Court. The post-Bork dance was scripted for all sides well in advance and just about everybody turned in a serviceable performance with a few noteworthy exceptions:
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota)
It was practically his first day as a Senator (he got a late start courtesy of the razor-thin margin of victory last fall and the ensuing lawsuits) but Al Franken jumped …

The trick’s as old as the five-day workweek. Dump your worst news on Friday afternoon after 5. It’ll end up in Saturday’s papers (the lowest readership of the week) and will get brief mention on the network newscasts (which have few viewers on Fridays — especially in the summer). Sadly the “we’re gonna change the way Washington works” Obama Administration knows the game too well.
And so at 5:18 Friday afternoon the Washington Post broke the story: The White House will decree by executive fiat that the President may hold terrorism suspects. …

There are two somewhat competing storylines that have been floating around the edges of the news coming out of Iran and both demonstrate how little we learn from history — and how little we know about Iran.
Several prominent analysts have argued that the vote in Iran was NOT substantially rigged and that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the choice of the majority of Iranians voting last weekend. Their arguments come down to this: Westerners viewed this election through a narrow lens that fails to capture the ethnic and cultural dynamics of …

 
It’s damn tough to be a Republican in New York these days. 
First the party lost a slew of Congressional seats in 2006. Then they surrendered control of the State Senate for the first time in two generations. This past winter they failed to regain the “most Republican” House seat in the state. And now this: President Obama has picked one of New York’s last three Republican Congressmen to be Secretary of the Army.
John McHugh has represented much of the northern third of the state since 1992 but has accepted Obama’s …

 
The king has been brought to his knees. General Motors is officially bankrupt. Hindsight is 20/20.
 
So far this has been a year of hand-wringing among economic pontificators who have variously proclaimed that the wreckage around us proves capitalism’s fatal flaws or it’s remarkable resilience. What is not often discussed is the way capitalism — true, pure capitalism — is colored by conservative ideology. GM is a case in point.
When General Motors and the United Auto Workers (as well as the rest of the auto industry at the time) entered into a …

Barack Obama may be, above all else, a savvier politician than even Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. Why? With his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court Obama has set a defining trap for Republicans: If they take the bait they will dig themselves deeper into the pit of electoral despair that will take a generation to climb out of.
There are two fundamental things to remember about America and voting: Women vote in bigger percentages than men (plus there are more of them to begin with) and Hispanics are …

 
So Florida Governor Charlie Crist is going to run for Senate. That should be good news for the GOP since the seat he’s running for is being vacated by another Republican (the hapless Mel Martinez) and Crist is very popular in the Sunshine State. The announcement, expected Tuesday, has gotten plenty of coverage but almost all of it avoided the (pink) elephant in the room: Crist is gay gay gay.
The rumors and reports have been well documented for years but a new documentary out this month called “Outrage” outs closeted public …

 
Partisan political change tends to move glacially. The South was ruled by Democrats pretty much forever until Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon discovered the “Southern Strategy.” Even then it took another 20 years for Republicans to make the South their center.
Likewise New England was rock-ribbed Republican from the Civil War until cracks began to show in the sixties. Only in the last decade has New Hampshire lost much of its GOP sheen and Maine still has two Republican Senators.
The turning point was the same — …

Two things have caught my attention in the last week that point out the deep and unmistakable hypocrisy of some Catholics who eagerly wade into American politics. First up: Notre Dame’s decision to give President Barack Obama an honorary degree.
The decision has rocked the Catholic and conservative political chattering classes because Obama supports abortion rights and the Church does not. Mary Ann Glendon has gotten a lot of play in the past 48 hours after posting a letter to Notre Dame explaining why she — a former US Ambassador to …

All of a sudden there is a debate over torture. A debate about whether or not torture might be okay to use in some cases. What’s stunning is not the arguments for and against but that there’s now an accepting underlying narrative. Conservative and liberal commentators who violently disagree about whether the U.S. should torture tacitly agree on one thing: Torture works.
Bullshit.
The relatively short list of those who argue that it has (Dick Cheney, Michael Hayden, Michael Mukasey) all offer either no proof (Cheney) or debunked claims (Hayden and Mukasey). And …