Another socialist blog

Another Bush loyalist is enjoying his reward. Miguel Estrada has been nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals after his work as a legal strategist for George W. Bush’s in the 2000 Florida election dispute at the Supreme Court, which made it possible for Bush to steal the electionC in broad daylight. Much has been made of his lack of any written legal opinions (he’s never served as a judge), but it’s not as if we don’t know what he’s hiding. The People for the American Way point out that Miguel Estrada has worked to defend anti-loitering laws “which have been demonstrated to disproportionately harm African-America ns and Latinos. Federal and state courts, including the Supreme Court, have inva lidated a number of these provisions as violating the First Amendment and the du e process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, including in several cases that Es trada has worked on.” His former former direct supervisor in the Solicitor General’s office, Paul Bender, told the Los Angeles Times that Estrada is so “ideologically driven that he couldn’t be trusted to state the law in a fair, neutral way,” and that he is a “right-wing ideologue” with “an agend a that’s similar to Clarence Thomas”. Miguel Estrada doesn’t believe the courts have any role in striking down unconstitutional laws.

Senator Grassley (R-IA) has defended Estrada, saying that for the Senate to refuse to confirm Estrada “would be to shut the door on the American dre am of Hispanic-Americans everywhere.” Strange talk from a Republican who has voted against affirmative action in the past. Maybe Trent Lott changed Grassley’s mind on that.

From last night’s State of the Union address: Your enemy is not surrounding your country — your enemy is ruling your country.

Yesterday’s Fresh Air on NPR featured an interview with Joseph Cirincione, who specializes in defense and proliferation iss ues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He’s no peace activist, but he does a great job debunking a lot of the Bush administration spin on the arms inspection, including the oft-mentioned aluminum tubes (which are not usable for nuclear weapons production).

Colin Powell made clear today that the United States is prepared to go it alone and invade Iraq without permission from the UN Security Council. “If it can’t be solved peacefully and if the U.N. should fail to act…then the United States reserves the right to do what it thinks is appropriate to defend its interests,” says Powell. In other words, United Nations resolutions are binding on Iraq, but are not binding on the United States. Hope that makes it clear.

You might enjoy this parody on the well-worn 419 scam.

Pay attention now. If we find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that means they were hiding them. If we don’t find them, it still means they’re hiding them. That’s the word from Donald Rumsfeld, who claimed Wednesday that “The fact that the inspectors have not yet come up with new evidence of Iraq’s WMD program could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq’s noncooperation.”

align=right alt=”confederate flag”> Just in case you thought the Republican Party had really thrown off its old racist baggage, I note that Bush administration will intervene today against the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy. While Dubya claims to be against segregation in higher education, he is steadfastly against any measures that would actually be effective in getting rid of it.

I predict that Trent Lott, who recently declared his strong support for affirmative action, will take this opportunity to be very, very quiet.

In an apparent breach of UN sanctions against Iraq, a British tobacco company has been accused of exporting cigarettes to that country.

Since the U.S. and its allies are getting ready to invade any minute, an action likely to result in the immediate deaths of quite a lot of Iraqi citizens, it does seem strange to object to killing them slowly.

North Korea has withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, prompting harsh condemnation from Washington. Secretary of State Colin Powell said “North Korea has thumbed its nose at the international community.”

North Korea’s behavior is in stark contrast to that of the United States, which has torn up the ABM Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and the treaty creating the International Criminal Court.

We are now faced with the spectacle of the Republicans’ “economic stimulus” package. I don’t doubt it is stimulating to the rich, who, under the Bush plan, will pay no income tax on their stock dividends.

The rationale for this, which is being repeated as fact in the media, is that stock dividends are double taxed: i.e., corporations pay income tax, then stockholders are taxed on the same after-tax corporate profits when dividends are paid.

Working people, of course, are in exactly the same boat. We pay income tax on our wages, then pay sales taxes when we spend our after-tax wages. There are no Republican proposals to curtail sales taxes, of course, nor any other regressive taxes.