It turns out that CNN's immigrant-bashing Lou Dobbs isn't the only prominent "birther" from Georgia who promotes the right-wing's loony contention that Barack Obama is not a native-born American citizen. Joining Dobbs on the front lines of this crazy fight is Rep. Nathan Deal, the GOP congressman from Gainesville.
Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson announced Thursday they will vote against the confirmation of federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. But there's something weird about this.
Even though he's one of the wing-nuttiest politicians that Georgians ever elected to Congress, there have been times when I found myself in agreement with Bob Barr. He has noted the failure of the never-ending war on drugs, for one thing. He was also consistent in speaking out against the flaws of the Patriot Act and other attacks on civil liberties promulgated by the Bush administration. But Bob never can resist the temptation to jump back into deep nuttiness.
Rare it is when members of Congress turn a deaf ear to the demands of their fat-cat lobbyist contributors and actually vote not to spend money on a huge pile of crap - but that's what happened in the Senate this week as senators, prodded by President Barack Obama, voted 58-40 to kill Saxby Chambliss' latest attempt to keep siphoning billions of taxpayer dollars to a pork-barrel project known as the F-22 Raptor.
Before he became a successful white supremacist on cable TV, Pat Buchanan was a speechwriter and communications director for presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. I've always thought that one of the great what-ifs of American history was this: What if Pat Buchanan had been asked to write the Gettysburg Address for Abraham Lincoln?
As Sarah Palin prepares to step down from her elected position of governor of Alaska - okay, she's a year and a half premature, but who's counting? - she can take pride in knowing that she's left a lump in the throat (and lower regions of the anatomy) of quite a few right-leaning pundits. Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen such an outbreak of puppy love over the last year as I've seen displayed by certain sections of the conservative commentariat towards the Quittah from Wasilla. These guys are so smitten as to be absolutely gobsmacked.
There is a lot that could be written about federal Judge Paul Magnuson's ruling that the Corps of Engineers has been illegally allowing metro Atlanta governments to withdraw water from Lake Lanier, but let's focus on this aspect of it: if the judge's ruling sticks (and I think it will), then all of the developers and construction companies who've been spreading subdivisions and strip shopping centers like a layer of radioactive manure over metro Atlanta are in for a rude awakening.
My "cousin" Craig Crawford does some blogging on CQ Politics and offers this insightful analysis of the expected fallout from this week's Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor:
From Tuesday's edition of the Raleigh News & Observer:
Sotomayor hearings set off broad debate
I certainly couldn't argue with that.
When the Senate Judiciary Committee holds its hearing this week on the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, the ranking Republican member of the committee will be a white senator from Alabama named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Sessions, who has been one of the most outspoken critics of the Latina judge, has a very interesting personal history on racial matters. Now, I understand that senators on the committee will ask the questions and Sotomayor will answer them in some form or fashion. But I wish the tables could be turned so that Sotomayor could ask the following questions of Sessions:
The Senate hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor begin this week. One of the witnesses Republicans are calling to testify will be Frank Ricci, the New Haven, Conn., firefighter who filed the anti-discrimination Ricci lawsuit decided recently by the Supreme Court.
Like Al Franken, Howard Dean is one of those progressive figures who seems to drive the bloggers and commentators on the right into screaming fits of madness - to the point where if he observed that the sun rose in the east, Erick Erickson and his cohorts would insist that the sun obviously rises in the west because all those dirty hippies like Dean are Marxist liars.
Many of you will no doubt remember how some elected officials in Cobb County were so virulently anti-gay back in the 1990s that one of the events in the Atlanta Olympics was yanked from the county and held elsewhere. Well, it looks like gays are getting a little payback in Marietta.
Eight months after the 2008 general election, the U.S. Senate finally seated its 100th member around 12:15 p.m. Tuesday when Al Franken was sworn in as the junior senator from Minnesota.
They laughed at Gov. Sonny Perdue when he unveiled a program to build more boat docks for bass fishing tournaments as his primary policy initiative. But that's nothing compared to the way people will be laughing if Perdue makes the wrong choice on his next Supreme Court appointment.
Sarah Palin, soon to be the former governor of Alaska, continued her use of basketball-related metaphors Monday by calling for Americans to "get off the bench" and put "a full-court press on socialists like Barack Obama who are trying to slam-dunk us with their tax tyranny."
Juliana has already covered the breaking news of Al Franken's long-delayed, hard fought victory in the Minnesota Senate race, so there's not much I can add to that. What is humorous to consider is how Franken's presence in the Senate is going to drive so many people straight into a padded cell at Central State Hospital.
