Senator Bill Frist recently reiterated his oft repeated statement that, "Supreme Court justice nominees deserve an up-or-down vote, and it would be absolutely wrong to deny him that." In the wake of the Harriet Miers nomination these words ring even hollower than ever. It’s understandable that Mr. Frist is distracted by the current Federal inquiries he is under, but not that much time has passed since the same phrase was uttered in regards to counselor Meirs’s nomination—before the Conservative base of the Republican Party threw a tantrum and the nomination was withdrawn. Are we now supposed to believe that, after having been passed over for Harriet Miers, Judge Alito is now the best the legal community has to offer? Could this have been anymore of a transparent political move tendered for the benefit of a small segment of American instead of the Nation as a whole? Some would point to the disheartening fact that President Bush declined to follow even his wife’s advice to replace Justice O’Connor with another women, or to follow in the footsteps of President Lyndon Johnson's landmark nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967 with the nomination of what could have been the first Hispanic appointed to the Court, yet the most compelling reason to fight Alito’s nomination is his record. A prospect for the highest court in the land must be a person of honesty and integrity. Does a person possessing such qualities renege on a promise to recuse himself from cases where he had a personal interest? Judge Alito pledged to the U.S. Senate during hearings for his position on 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals that he would do just that if the situation called for it, yet on numerous occasions Alito has failed to live up to his word. In 1995, despite an unequivocal written response in the affirmative to questions from the US Senate just five year previous, Bush’s nominee failed to remove himself from a case involving his sister Rosemary Alito’s employer, law firm McCarter & English. In addition he failed to recuse himself from a 2002 case involving Smith Barney, a brokerage firm that managed his six-figure personal investment. Instead of offering an honest explanation for these actions, a succession of disingenuous rationales has been offered to the public. First it was all because of a computer glitch, then, a decade after the fact, his pledge was suddenly to restrictive. Just as disturbing is Judge Alito’s submission on a job application for a position in the Reagan administration, in which he pointed to his membership in an organization, called the Concerned Alumni of Princeton as evidence of his "philosophical commitment" toward Reagan administration policy. During his time at Princeton and when he was still promoting his membership over a decade later, this group made its name fighting integration of women and minorities on campus. While his job application clearly points out his membership in this organization, he has now reversed course -- his response to questions from Senators last month was, "I have no recollection of being a member or attending meetings." The sudden memory loss, reminiscent of Chief Justice John Roberts memory lapse concerning his membership in The Federalist society, is understandable when you consider that, “ In 1975, an alumni panel that included Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the current Republican leader and a 1974 Princeton graduate, concluded that Concerned Alumni had "presented a distorted, narrow and hostile view of the university that cannot help but have misinformed and even alarmed many alumni" and "undoubtedly generated adverse national publicity." The lifetime appointment of a Supreme Court Justice has significant ramification for the future of our country, and a person seeking a lifetime appointment must be upfront and honest with the Senate – as well as the American people. Americans deserve a Supreme Court Justice who doesn't need a computer to tell the difference between right and wrong. It’s time for the White House to treat this process with the respect it deserves, and for Bill Frist to back off his posturing, blustering, and unproductive threats to subvert said process by using the “nuclear option.” I know, I know, so much for the 12 days of commenting. I see this situation though, and I find my voice, however talking point heavy. Join me. Click on the picture below to write a letter to the editor.

THE BIGGEST JOKE in politics is the Republican desire to run against not at all “radical” Hillary Clinton in 2008. Hillary Clinton is a radical candidate the way wheat bread is radical for somebody who thinks lunch must be another sandwich and the supermarket is out of white bread. If there is mustard on her sandwich, it won’t be French dijon or anything with a bold flavor. Her allies call her cautious, which is another way of saying I will wait and see what works. Dan Balz in the WaPo has some “analysis” on her on the war

Social Darwinism

Barak Obama says:

It's called the "Ownership society" in Washington. This isn't the first time this philosophy has appeared. It used to be called Social Darwinism....They have a philosophy they have implemented and that is doing exactly what it was designed to do. They basically don't believe in government. They have a different philosophy that says, "We're going to dismantle government"....Republicans running the federal government believe, "You are on your own to buy your own health care, to buy your own retirement security ... to buy your own roads and levees."

The War on Christmas

Sam Seder did a pretty good job on CNN today giving this issue the degree of respect it deseserves:

SEDER: Listen, as far as the war on Christmas goes, I feel like we should be waging a war on Christmas. I mean, I believe that Christmas, it's almost proven that Christmas has nuclear weapons, can be an imminent threat to this country, that they have operative ties with terrorists and I believe that we should sacrifice thousands of American lives in pursuit of this war on Christmas. And hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

EUGENE McCARTHY 1916-2005 McCarthy was hero of antiwar movement Eugene McCarthy, the senator whose run for the 1968 Democratic nomination galvanized the antiwar movement and crippled the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, died at age 89. BY MARTIN MERZER mmerzer@herald.com An unpopular war was going badly. The nation was restless. One politician stepped up. The year was 1968. The war was in Vietnam. The politician was Eugene J. McCarthy. McCarthy died in his sleep Saturday at an assisted living facility in Washington, D.C. He was 89 years old, and in his way, he was a hero. At a crucial point of his life and in the nation's history, McCarthy took a stand and he helped to end a war, and he showed that it could be done within the system. ''The fellows running this war don't know where they're going or what they're up to,'' McCarthy said in retrospect during an interview years later. 'You didn't have to make a great moral judgment on it. You could simply say, `It doesn't make any sense.' ''

1 December 1940 - 10 December 2005

There is something I don't do but two or three time a year; go to the movie theater. I can easily name the last three or four movies I’ve seen in the big screen: Star Wars Episode III, Sin City, and Kill Bill volumes One and Two. Last night one of those rare occasions came about where I deemed it worth my while to journey out in the world. Last night I took my daughter to see The Chronicles of Narnia. Simply stated, I don’t go out to see a movie unless I think it can deliver. Through some complicated internal process whose machinations are curtained even to my conscience mind, this determination is made and seeing it is set in stone , the exception being “Good Morning, Good Night” which never came to a theater near me because of what appears to be a Conservative conspiracy. It’s been over a decade since I’ve read any of The Chronicles of Narnia, so, unlike when I watched The Fellowship of the Ring, many of the fine details have faded with time. It was easy to catch the missing scenes in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the Tolkien classic, not so much with The Chronicles of Narnia. I can say that the whole thing flowed smoothly, with no revisionist fantasy, and the underlying Christian aspects of the story weren't overwrought. In fact it did leave me grinning at the thought that there are Christian families that will go to see the movie and be exposed to as many or more mythological creatures and as much witchcraft as was seen in Harry Potter movies. It is good, but in the wake of a new Harry Potter movie and the Lord of the Rings trilogy it feels a little light. It didn’t feel as English as the first and the CG wasn’t as strong as the latter. I guess the only test that matters is the one it passed. When I asked my daughter if she liked it she said yes. When I said, “better than the goblet of fire,” she said, “unhuh.”

Sami al-Arian is a Palestinian born in Kuwait and living in the United States for the last 30 years. He’s married and has five children, all of them American citizens (one of them a graduate of Duke University). Until 2002, al-Arian was a $66,000-a-year tenured professor in computer science at the University of South Florida, where he’d been teaching 16 years. He was also a guest of Karl Rove at the White House in June 2001, part of a Muslim group of activists the White House wanted to thank for their support in the 2000 election: Yes, conservative Muslims in the United States are natural allies of the GOP. The always-expedient George Bush, with Laura, had personally thanked al-Arian for his support during a campaign appearance in Florida, captured in a picture by the St. Petersburg Times. All along, and since 1995, the FBI’s Division of McCarthyism had been on al-Arian’s tail following a television documentary and articles in the Tampa Tribune linking him, by word and image but never by deed, to violent Palestinian causes, jihad, suicide bombers, terrorism. Note the prejudice of the last sentence: It assumes that because al-Arian supported Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, he was a participant in terrorism. The leap is entirely specious on two grounds: Opinions, including fund-raising, are not deeds (ask the Republican or Democratic Party whose campaign-finance payola system always hides behind the First Amendment). And “terrorism” is itself an incendiary bomb of a word. In a few cases terrorism is clear-cut: willful attacks on civilians with no other immediate goal but to massacre civilians. In most cases terrorism is in the eyes of the beholder, and in most of those cases, the beholder see no further than immediate prejudices, fears, misconceptions and easy slanders. Cue in Bill O’Reilly ambushing al-Arian on the O’Reilly Factor on September 26, 2001. Al-Arian and his mosque in Florida had immediately and unequivocally condemned the 9/11 attacks (as had the mass of Muslims everywhere, though you’d never know it from this side of the American media’s filters). Al-Arian, unaware of O’Reilly’s fetish for slander, thought O’Reilly would query him about those issues. “It was stupid,” Al-Arian would later tell the Washington Post. “I should have known better.” Al-Arian’s hatred for Israel is well documented. It may be bigoted and anti-Semitic to the core. But it’s not a crime. Besides making it appear as if it were, O’Reilly couldn’t get anything on al-Arian. The best he had was that one of al-Arian’s colleagues who’d worked at USF at his behest left the university and joined Palestinian Islamic Jihad, making al-Arian a “terrorist” by association. That sort of argument would make everyone who befriended Pol-Pot and taught him engineering in Paris in the early 1950s, beginning with those who brought him there on a French scholarship, guilty by association of the Cambodian genocide. Idiotic argument. But no one ever factors intelligence into the O’Reilly equation. Failing on evidence, O’Reilly slandered al-Arian with innuendo: O’Reilly: “Well, Doctor, you know, with all due respect -- I appreciate you coming on the program, but if I was the CIA, I'd follow you wherever you went. I'd follow you 24 hours ... Al-Arian: Well, you don't know me. You don't know me. You do not ... O'Reilly: That doesn't matter. With all of this circumstantial evidence ... I'd go to Denny's with you, and I'd go everywhere you went. We appreciate you coming on. [The transcript is available here.] With that, death threats to al-Arian began, and so did the witch hunt for al-Arian’s head, led by the disgraceful, O’Reillyesque attacks on the associate professor by University of South Florida President Judy Genshaft, who wanted him fired. Genshaft’s justification was that al-Arian was harming his responsibilities to the university’s “interests” (fund-raising, research grants, alumni relations. No word about the university’s foremost interest: academic freedom.) The USF faculty senate and faculty union both voted against Genshaft’s decision to fire al-Arian, and for a time his fate looked no different than that of the late Edward Said, the Palestinian professor at Columbia University who’d been photographed lobbing stones at Israel, from the Lebanese side of a border fence. At Columbia, faculty and student unions wanted Said fired but university trustees stood by him. Plus, he was a superstar. Leukemia got to Said. The FBI got to al-Arian. He was arrested in February 2003, fired from the university, and locked up, mostly in solitary confinement, for more than two years. His trial began on June 6, ending yesterday as it began: As nothing more credible than if Bill O’Reilly had led the prosecution. There was one difference: Jurors had a chance to make a fair and balanced decision, because they heard all the evidence, something O’Reilly never allows his viewers to do. Jurors heard this instruction from the judge, and made it the deciding factor in their verdict: “Our law does not criminalize beliefs or mere membership in an organization. A person who is in sympathy with the legitimate aim of an organization but does not intend to accomplish that aim by a resort to illegal activity is not punished for adherence to lawful purposes of speech.” Of course al-Arian is not free. The FBI is looking for ways to retry him on some of the charges that resulted in a mistrial. And the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration brigades, our government’s default setting for vindictiveness, can’t wait to get their hands on al-Arian’s deportation proceedings. The father to five American children who’d led a life no less valuable and interesting and enriching for also being controversial—and a man whose abilities were sought after by this White House—will likely find himself shuttled out of the very country for which he said these words soon after his not-guilty verdict: “God bless America.” He’s not in free, because the country itself is not in the clear from the witch-hunt mentality that resulted in al-Arian’s arrest in the first place, and many like it (with less just outcomes) across the country. I’ve been picking on O’Reilly, but only because his “Factor” lit the inquisition’s fires. O’Reilly’s likes from Sean Hannity to Joe Sacrborough to talk radio’s chorus of brown-shirted voices daily reduce American discourse to a wasteland. Without so much baseness and baselessness on the air, the nation’s leaders couldn’t possibly be as base and the nation’s liberty crushing laws as baseless, or as popular. You need only read the New York Times’ first paragraph in Wednesday’s front-page article on the trial: “In a major defeat for law enforcement officials, a jury in Florida failed to return guilty verdicts Tuesday on any of 51 criminal counts against a former Florida professor and three co-defendants accused of operating a North American front for Palestinian terrorists.” Why a “major defeat for law-enforcement officials” and not a major victory for free speech, civil rights, due process? Why judge that a jury “failed” by not returning guilty verdicts—why the failure of negatives—rather than the more affirmative emphasis on the not-guilty angle, on al-Arian’s acquittal, on the victory of positive liberty? Because in the popular interpretation and prosecution of this so-called war on terror, evidence has nothing to do with guilt. Perception is enough. That’s why the jury was hung on several charges. As one juror told the St. Petersburg Times, “Ten of us wanted to acquit them on all charges, but two wouldn’t tell us what the evidence was to convict, but wouldn’t go along with acquittal.” That’s the sobering lesson of the al-Arian story from its beginnings, and the lesson of Patriot Act-America since 2001: We are no longer a society of evidence, fairness and due process, those qualities of law we’re supposedly trying to impose on Iraq and Afghanistan. We’re all guilty until proven innocent. Al-Arian got lucky. He’s the exception for now, and not much of one. His deportation plane is fueling up. And his prosecutors, Bill O’Reilly-like inquisitors among them, still gang about, as deaf and blind to American principles as a mob of neo-McCarthyites. Tristam is an editorial writer and columnist at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and editor of Candide’s Notebooks.