One of my blogmates over at The Next Hurrah said of the nomination of Harriet Miers: “There is no need for the Dems to be deferential here.”
If the party had banners like samurai cavalry, this is the slogan that ought to be emblazoned on every one of them.
Instead, based on high Democrats’ comments so far, it seems the leadership is already furling its flags, breaking its swords and hobbling the horses before the battle has been engaged. Pathetic.
Read More Caption? Mine might be: I just nominated my Mommy. I’m scared of my Mommy. I’m scared of Harriet Mommy too. I wasn’t kiddin’ about the pit bull part. My hind end still hurts! Me lookin’ awful gray lately. Me awful tired. Me want pillow. |
“Stone cold” … “ate nails for breakfast” … mixed up with Ben Barnes, a former lobbyist to the state lottery, and who we remember from the “60 Minutes”-Dubya-Nat’l Guard scandal. (Philly Daily News, last week, discovered that Miers “managed” the Nat’l Guard scandal during “Bush’s Texas gubenatorial campaign in 1998 (when he was starting to eye the White House) [and] paid Miers $19,000 to run an internal pre-emptive probe of the potential scandal.”)
“Miers had stormy tenure at Texas Lottery,” from the A.P., 45 minutes ago, via the SJ Mercury News (sub. free).
Ben Barnes to break silence on “60 Minutes”: The Republican campaign gets ready for shock waves, as the former Texas official who says he pulled strings to get George W. Bush into the Air National Guard finally goes public. (Salon, Sept. 1, 2004)AUSTIN, Texas – Harriet Miers proved to be a tough, no-nonsense administrator during her five years heading the Texas Lottery Commission, firing two executive directors to stamp out scandal but leaving unexpectedly … One of those firings stirred up questions about whether political influence helped George W. Bush avoid active duty in Vietnam.
[Her nomination to the high court prompts] closer scrutiny of Miers’ years in Texas as a private attorney, a member of the Dallas City Council and chairwoman of the three-member commission that oversees the state’s lottery operations.
“Although she’s a small-framed woman, we all believed she came through the Marines and maybe ate nails for breakfast because she’s one tough cookie,” said Horace Taylor, a former lottery employee who worked for Miers.
Then-Gov. George W. Bush appointed Miers to a six-year-term on the commission shortly after he was elected governor in 1994. After she’d been on the job 18 months, news surfaced that the lottery director’s boyfriend had been employed as a consultant for GTECH, the lottery’s main contractor.
The Miers-led commission fired the director, Nora Linares, in January 1997, … Linares filed suit against the commission but later dropped that lawsuit and instead sued GTECH. An agreement ending the dispute with the commission exonerated Linares…
It was [also] a lawsuit… [that] helped to ignite questions about whether Bush used political influence to avoid active duty during the Vietnam War. ….
[It was] suggested that former Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes … a lobbyist for GTECH until January 1997, helped the company keep its state contract to run the lottery in exchange for keeping silent about how he had helped Bush get into the National Guard in the late 1960s. […]
Miers resigned as lottery commission chairman in 2000, a year early …
More from Greg Palast below:
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…
Read MoreThe right wing is every bit as disillusioned as the left wing. Compare the quotes below with the posts in our own threads here.
From Daily Dish:
From Right Wing News:
George Bush’s decision to appoint Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court is bitterly disappointing. Miers is a Bush crony with no real conservative credentials, who leapfrogged legions of more deserving judges just because she was Bush’s pal…. To merely describe Miers as a terrible pick is to underestimate her sheer awfulness as a selection.
More below the fold:
Read More[From the diaries by susanhu. Fascinating and troubling, Joe.] In addition to death and taxes, people growing up on the Saginaw Bay, have to face two other stark realities in life. One is that the area’s economic life blood is tied to the success of General Motors. The other is that, at some point in life, some time must be spent as a sport fisherman.
My stepfather is a master angler. He pulls perch and walleye from the Saginaw Bay at an alarming rate. But he has complained to me recently that the Bay is too crowded. I found this odd, since the population of my hometown has decreased from about 60,000 in the 1960s to somewhere around 30,000 today, this loss being almost directly related to the decline in the automobile industry.
“It’s all the shop rats,” my stepfather told me, referring to G.M. retirees. “They retire, get their boats and spend all their time on the Bay.”
I read a story in today’s New York Times that makes me think that some of those G.M. retirees might be fishing with a little more earnestness in the near future.
Read More
