Is it just me, or are Republicans cynical and hypocritical when it comes to their own promotion of minority members from within?

Desperate to conceal the fact that they're the white person's party, they parade out the gospel singers and R&B artists at the national convention, while actual black delegates are asked to "fetch a taxi or carry luggage" for the white people in attendance.

That said, for a party that opposes affirmative action and claims to favor meritocracy (notwithstanding their opposition to equalized school funding, or the widespread use of legacies in college admissions), it's very unseemly how Republicans tend to find minorities for high judicial positions, and how they claim they're always the most qualified for the job.

Clarence Thomas's judicial experience consisted of a year on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals following chairing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a position he held due to the fact that he opposed affirmative action and the civil rights movement's objectives, all while conveniently being black.

A whole one year spent on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals isn't much experience (just compare Thomas's judicial experience with that of every other justice's biography here) at all. Yet when Thurgood Marshall's seat (Justice Marshall was a great champion of civil rights; he argued Brown vs. Board of Education on behalf of Brown) opened up in 1991, George H.W. Bush claimed he was the "most qualified for the job."

Notice where Clarence Thomas came from: The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Who are George W. Bush's two most recent nominees for the DC Circuit Court? Miguel Estrada and Janice Rogers Brown, hispanic and African-American, respectively.

Am I insinuating that minorities aren't qualified for high judicial office? Absolutely not. There are tons of superb minority jurists on the federal bench. They just tend to have gotten there due to the efforts of Democratic presidents. Or didn't get there due to Republicans in the Senate. Liberals also tend to follow the normal path: state courts, district courts, then circuit courts of appeals. When Republicans want the facade of diversity, they just put whatever ideologue that's on hand up for high court.

Chris Matthews is good for nothing if you ask me. I don't see how someone who was an aide to former House Speaker Tip O'Neill (D-MA) can be so soft-hitting and forgiving to the cast of hard conservatives and wishy-washy centrists he has on his show.

Tonight he matched up an apolitical reporter (Howard Fineman) from Newsweek with a right wing Republican press secretary flack (Mindy Tucker) to discuss a recent ad run by the Democratic National Committee, which slammed the Bush White House over the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity.

After it was aired, Chris immediately turned to Mindy Tucker (R-Prevaricator's Haven) to get her response. She blustered off a series of sentence fragments about "unproven allegations" before Chris turns to Howard Fineman who says, and I quote, " ." Yeah, I quote him as saying absolutely nothing.

The search for truth, thus advanced, ended.

What's too bad is that there wasn't a panel capable of actual discussion. Had I been there, my response would have gone something like this:

"What's unproven? The CIA has said that Valerie Plame was an undercover operative who had been supervising and overseeing multiple field agents and operated a front company, all meant to fight WMD proliferation. These were all compromised. The CIA further said that the release of her identity has damaged our national security. Robert Novak wrote in his original July column that he was told the name of said agent by senior administration officials.

That the White House's actions were treasonous and grossly illegal cannot be contested. The only "unproven" part is George W. Bush personal authorization or consent."

The fact that White House talking heads are pushing the "unproven" line of argument tells me that they're running scared about what will be uncovered.

If the President and the White House as a whole were innocent of wrong doing, and were truly ignorant of who leaked the information, Mindy should have had no problem saying that someone did break the law and George Bush wants to find out who, so they can be handcuffed and escorted out of the White House.

Instead she (and other right wingers) denies that there was even any crime committed. Who is she trying to protect?

Bush knows who did it. Administration officials know who did it. Their silence and their lack of cooperation in the investigation is inexcusable and repugnant. These people are traitors and dishonorable scum. They'll do whatever they can to obtain and hold onto power, and they've got to be exposed and destroyed.

Here's a question for the supposed anti-terrorism warriors in the White House: Why are the Taliban doing anything besides being dead and gone?

Why is it that Afghanistan is unsecure outside of Kabul?

Why is it that we still haven't caught Osama bin Laden?

It is undeniable that the Iraq war diverted intelligence and special ops resources away from Afghanistan. This is perplexing, considering Al-Qaida and the Taliban pose a continuing, deadly threat to the US, whereas it's self-evidently clear Iraq didn't and wasn't going to ever.

The idea that George W. Bush is an effective leader in the "war against terrorism" is a myth. He's pathetic. He's failing to stablize and democratize Afghanistan, he squandered a massive windfall of international goodwill following 9/11 on a personal grudge match in Iraq, and he can't even find his two main enemies.

Then again, he can't even find a leaker in his own White House. Maybe he's not really pathetic, just dangerously incompetent.

Something I truly do not understand in this day and age is the habit, almost a reflexive tic, of the right to deride all and anything liberal as "communist," as if that's an end-all pejorative label. The Cold War ended in 1991, but you'll still have communism trotted out as the red bogeyman very frequently.

There's also the tendency to equate nazism with communism as the two polar extremes of evil. I don't agree with that formulation.

Nazism's legacy to the world was racial hate, eugenic theory, and rocket technology. And of course the millions of dead from WWII.

Communism had a huge body count, but I'd venture a guess that given the time and geographical extent that the USSR enjoyed that Germany's tally would be much higher.

I'm not a communist. I believe in property rights and the market system as the most efficient means of production. But I do resent "communist" used as a last retort. There's a much longer, indepth discussion here, on maxspeak.org.

What a joke. California voters are sick of empty rhetoric and unfulfilled promises? Then could someone kindly explain to me what Arnold's legislative plan consists of.

Oh, wait a second. He never created one. But he sure knows how to say "taxes are too high" and how to sexually assault women.

Arnold is a novelty. He'll wear thin real quick. Jesse Ventura sure did here in Minnesota.