Laboring in the Vineyard One Sip at a Time

Tags

Democrats, economy, evolution, faith, FDR, gay rights, GOP, midterm elections, Obama, Paul Krugman, Politics, recession, Roman Catholicism, Technology

Happy Labor Day! I want to tell you I’m laboring too, over a nice bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. Yes I am. Some short ribs on a slow cook in the oven slathered with sauce and pasta salad and corn relish melding in the fridge. It’s a quiet, fairly overcast day.

Yesterday the Bronco did good. We got into town for a whirlwind trip of groceries and hair cuttings and a new vacuum cleaner. Still much to be done, and of course the next disaster is no doubt lurking around a corner waiting to pounce. But as of now, things have calmed.

We have taped the entire Star Wars saga and are going to watch them in order. A novel idea doncha think?

I’m twittering a lot these days. Which means I haven’t devoted the time I usually do to blogging and blogs. So much fun on twitter with the retweets. I get sometimes a half-dozen new followers a day, and come across some funny stuff. It’s also fun to think you are actually talking to people you watch on TV. Why Sarah speaks, and Keith and Rachel and Colbert and ME chime in with tastefully snotty replies. It’s a hoot.

I don’t know how Martha Stewart does it, juggling all the stuff she does. Nor other Type A personalities who are driven. I’m not so driven. But you knew that.

One of the reasons why in some regions of planet earth, humans moved forward into more sophisticated modes of community, was based on whether they had indigenous animals suitable for domesticating. This allowed greater movement of peoples and their belongings but also allowed drudge work of farming to be handled by animals, freeing up our minds and hands to other creative pursuits.

A number of evolutionarily interested folks are looking at the changes we were thus able to make in our new “community” way of life as driving forward our bigger brains. In essence, perhaps gene mutation is one factor, but new ways of living push us forward as well. A new book lays this out and is worth a look at. Read a short review of The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution.

A goodly number of folks would tell you that the Dems are about to suffer some mighty big losses come this November. Of course, if we become pessimistic and decide not to vote, then we will cause that to be true. That’s a self-fulfilling prophesy as they say. But Jim Kessler (who has some street cred here) has some ideas of why it need not be so. We need to find some optimism here, so do read.

One of many things that disgusts me about the average American voter is that they seem to have the attention span of a gnat. Everyone knows that you don’t recover from the ditch Bush and his evil band put us in, in a couple of years. Yet as much as Obama has cautioned that it will take years to recover, people are ready to throw him and Democrats out and usher in the party of NO simply because they are like two-year olds with no self-control. So the recession will drag on for more years than necessary. Remember FDR did not turn around the country in four years either, certainly not in two. Read Paul Krugman’s assessment.

There is a story at Killing the Buddha by Alane Mason. It’s about a gay friend, about death, dying, but most of all about faith and living. It is breathtakingly beautiful in its writing and in what it says. It is one of those pieces that make you gasp at the strange beauty of our humanity. It gives pause, it gives hope. You should just read it.

I still mourn Freddy Mercury, lead singer of Queen. He died of AIDS, back when everyone infected died of AIDS. He would have been 64. So many of our finest artists died in those early years. So many died, and were reviled and shrunk from as if breathing the same air they did was dangerous. We didn’t know better I guess, but still awful.

I remember being a lawyer and seeing deputies wear surgical gloves just to touch an inmate who was HIV positive. I recall a court clerk who scraped a pen used by an infected inmate into the garbage can with a piece of paper. I remember, and I am ashamed for those people and their ugly fears and callous behavior.

Grumpy Lion sends us over to Common Dreams to read a long essay by David Michael Green. I’m an American.  I live in a country – nay, an empire! – that insists on destroying itself. He echoes my thoughts, far more eloquently that I ever could. Read it and sigh. It is all too true I fear. And when you have finished reading, you will weep.

Have a good barbecue today folks and see ya tomorrow!

Confirmation History Lesson 101

Tags

confirmation hearings, Congress, FDR, Hainsworth/Carswell, John Cornyn, Robert Bork, SCOTUS, Sonia Sotomayor

Things have gone awry. I don’t think many people would disagree about that, though you could probably get as many solutions as there are people if you asked. I’m not here to offer mine necessarily, but to point out that what worked two hundred plus years ago in a mostly agrarian land ain’t exactly workin’ today.

Now here in Iowa, we see things a bit differently no doubt than do the Easterners with their snooty, older than you, center of the universe mentality, or than the Westerners with their bored, soooo yesterday kind of dismissal of the world as mostly irrelevant.   We provided for the fact that our state constitution needs a periodic look see. Every ten years we actually vote on whether to hold a constitutional convention or not, to reform, add, subtract, or throw out and start all over, our experiment in government.

I’m not suggesting that we do that federally, no doubt it would cause quite a mess. But what to do about non-functioning institutions is a serious question that we should look at. Case in point, the confirmation process for new appointees to the Supreme Court of the US.

The circus, called the Confirmation hearings, have begun if you hadn’t noticed. All the players, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, met with the nominee, smiled for the cameras, promised civil discourse, and claimed to have an “open mind.” 

 Once in the arena, things of course go the usual course. One Republican tries to embarrass her with questions about “empathy” and “smart Latina women” questions, punctuated by nose-up-the-butt-boy, Lindsay Graham asking her, “Do you know that you are considered the most intemperate of justices by far than any of your colleagues?” This is followed by one Democrat who lauds her accomplishments and suggests all the “right” answers to the questions, called “rehabilitating the witness.” This goes on back and forth all day, and into the next.

It’s all predictable, and in the end mostly the vote will be along party lines, except for a few who will vote for her only because they face elections in heavily Latino populations or have some other hidden agenda which we won’t know about.

Such has been the way things go for a very long time. It started, dare I say, during the terms of FDR when Franklin got tired of having his progressive legislation dumped by the sitting SCOTUS and was hell-bent on “packing” it with more justices, all of whom, were expected to uphold his laws. That didn’t work, but it started the idea I think that it was important when picking a justice to have some idea what they might do beyond decide cases.

In other words, how they decided because more important than qualifications. Duh, who would have guessed. Qualifications was a pretty impersonal thing after all, most reasonable people can agree that one meets or doesn’t meet them. Sarah the Moosehunter doesn’t meet any qualification for anything beyond having an active womb and carving a nice steak on the ground. William Jennings Bryant met them all for being a judge. See how easy it is?

We started to realize how darned important this stuff was when Eisenhower picked Warren as chief justice and got a whole lot more than he bargained for. Most of our search and seizure rules and Brown v. Board, and all that liberal stuff came from him. Eisenhower considered it one of his worst decisions, picking Warren that is.

But nobody seemed very good at predicting, so things go around to looking at “character.” Hainsworth and Carswell were dismissed by the Senate as unqualified. In reality, they both got caught with too many arguable racist comments and rulings to be fit for office in the still new days of racial equality ushered in by Brown, and Johnson’s voting rights legislation. Whether they were qualified in terms of legal knowledge, heck I don’t remember if anyone even cared.

Then came Robert Bork, and a new era began. Here, no personal character issues upset the apple cart, but judicial philosophy entered the arena as the tried and true means for determining one’s “qualifications.” Bork was appointed by Reagan and was an “originalist,” believing that the proper philosophy for deciding cases was to get as close to the original founding fathers intent as possible. This of course means no such things are “privacy” (not mentioned) and that sort of thing, and that means the death of such things as Roe v. Wade and other “privacy” type cases. He was not confirmed, and now not being confirmed because of philosophy rather than qualifications is called “being borked.”

Now we are up to our necks in “judicial activism” (read judges making law), versus “strict constructionists” (read originalists). In actuality as we all pretty much know, judicial activism means essentially, not doing what I want you do to do.

And so we are subjected to “confirmation” hearings that are three-ring circuses where the same questions are asked again and again. No senator is allowed, apparently, to say, “Gee, Senator X asked all my questions thoroughly, I have no more questions.” No they just ask them all over again. Instead of determining whether Judge Sotomayor is qualified (given she’s been confirmed twice now, that would seem rather obvious), we are part of this game of “how this plays in Podunk,” and jockeying for position for the next election cycle.

It’s all a monumental waste of time, ours and theirs, and accomplishes nothing except to insure that payback awaits the next change in party and the next opening on the Court. We have gotten marginally better at figuring out how they will act on the bench, due to some poli sci profs and computers, and so it all matters in the end. But the show is about nothing but, well show.

I keep wondering how Cornyn is going to vote though. I hear he’s getting booed in Texas and well, they are pretty darn chuck full of Latinos there. I bet he’s hating this thing to the max. One takes one’s amusement where one can.