The 'Who Done It' Battle

The true reality is that people are the losers while the heads of the banks and the corporate CEO's get richer. Money going to the top does not trickle down to the bottom. But Paul Krugman and Robert Scheer are both sure they know 'Who Done It.'

Reagan Done It By Paul Krugman

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. ... All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Now, the proximate causes of today’s economic crisis lie in events that took place long after Reagan left office — in the global savings glut created by surpluses in China and elsewhere, and in the giant housing bubble that savings glut helped inflate.

But it was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable. Overstretched borrowers were bound to start defaulting in large numbers once the housing bubble burst and unemployment began to rise.

These defaults in turn wreaked havoc with a financial system that — also mainly thanks to Reagan-era deregulation — took on too much risk with too little capital.

Reagan Didn’t Do It By Robert Scheer

Reagan didn’t do it, but Clinton-era Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, now a top economic adviser in the Obama White House, did. They, along with then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Republican congressional leaders James Leach and Phil Gramm, blocked any effective regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives that turned into the toxic assets now being paid for with tax dollars.

How can Krugman ignore the wreckage wrought during the Clinton years by the gang of five? Rubin, who convinced President Clinton to end the New Deal restrictions on the merger of financial entities, went on to help run the too-big-to-fail Citigroup into the ground. Gramm became a top officer at the nefarious UBS bank. Greenspan’s epitaph should be his statement to Congress in July 1998 that “regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.” That same week Summers assured banking lobbyists that the Clinton administration was committed to preventing government regulation of swaps and other derivatives trading.

Then-Rep. Leach, as chairman of the powerful House Banking Committee, codified that concern in legislation to prevent the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or anyone else from regulating the OTC derivatives, and American Banker magazine reported that the legislation “sponsored by Chairman Jim Leach is most popular with the financial services industry because it would provide so-called legal certainty for swaps transactions. … ”

Legal certainty for swaps—meaning the insurance policies of the sort that AIG sold for collateralized debt obligations without looking too carefully into what was being insured and, more important, without putting aside reserves to back up the policies in the case of defaults—is what caused the once respectable company to eventually be taken over by the U.S. government at a cost of $185 billion to taxpayers.

Leach, an author of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which allowed banks like Citigroup to become too big to fail, is now a member of the board of directors of ProPublica, which bills itself as “a non-profit newsroom producing journalism in the public interest.” Leach serves as the chair of a prize jury that ProPublica has created to honor “outstanding investigative work by governmental groups,” and perhaps he will grant one retrospectively to Brooksley Born and the federal commission she ran so brilliantly before Leach and his buddies destroyed her.

Who will change it?

Things To Know

Hospitals Save Money with Homeless Outreach

Hospitals actually saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by helping to provide additional services to the homeless.

Two studies, one in Chicago and the other in Seattle, prove we can save health care dollars by housing and helping the homeless. Read More...

200 Executions and Counting: Texas Gov. Rick Perry's Cruel Death Tally

Today marks the 200th execution under Perry, a record even deadlier than George W. Bush's tenure. What's the matter with Texas? Read More...

How Much Has Changed? Obama Administration Deals Series of Anti-Environmental Blows

The Dems have unleashed a slew of anti-environmental policies that would have enraged any reasonable conservationist during the Bush years. Read More...

Cheney's Caveat

Former VP Dick Cheney says that he supports 'gay unions.' But there is a caveat. He believes that this is not a federal question but a state's right to determine the legality and definition of marriage.

Speaking at the National Press Club, Cheney was asked about the legality of gay marriage in the US:

"I think that freedom means freedom for everyone. As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don't support. I do believe that the historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis. ... But I don't have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that."

Cheney's statement that "... it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family" speaks volumes!

Cheney Disavows 9/11-Iraq Link

Truthdig has the story...

White House photo by David Bohrer
Dick Cheney, then vice president, laughs as he makes a fool of us all.

On Monday, former Veep Dick Cheney admitted at long last that there was no link between the Sept. 11 attacks and Iraq, contrary to what the Bush administration had led the nation to believe in 2003 in order to justify waging a war on a country rich in history, culture ... and oil. Tens of thousands of Iraqi and American casualties later, we thank you, Dick.

Bloomberg:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney disavowed intelligence he once cited to suggest that then-Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaeda to stage the Sept. 11 attacks.

Cheney said reporting by the Central Intelligence Agency of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda on Sept. 11 “turned out not to be true.” Still the vice president said there had been a longstanding relationship between Hussein and terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, that justified the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Read More

Mike's Letter

Goodbye, GM ...by Michael Moore

I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.

As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?

It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.

So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with -- dare I say it -- joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.

But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know -- who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let's be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?

Thus, as GM is "reorganized" by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:

1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.

We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.

The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn't give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true -- that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.

President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.

2. Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.

3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.

4. Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.

5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.

6. For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we're going to have automobiles, let's have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories -- that simply isn't true).

7. Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.

8. Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.

9. To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.

Well, that's a start. Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.

100 years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long. We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front -- and the back -- seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window down Hwy. 1. And now it's over. It's a new day and a new century. The President -- and the UAW -- must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.

Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.

So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

A Most Difficult Decision

The following article is from The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan. It is a personal and compelling account of the difficult, emotional and torment filled decision of abortion.

It's So Personal: Not Knowing For Sure

A reader writes:

When I was pregnant with my second child, this is what happened to me. I was in the middle of the "feel good" sonogram at 21 weeks when the technician made a funny face and said that she was having difficulty getting some measurements. Her supervisor came in and took over, after asking me whether I had any other children and whether they were normal. And then I spoke with the radiologist, who was blunt and dour, and helped me get an immediate referral to Children's Hospital, where, several specialized sonograms later, we got as grim a verdict as I could possibly have imagined: a severe brain defect, a severe heart defect, other highly unusual but not easily interpreted "signs" of impairment, including structural or neurological deficits associated with swallowing and other motor functions. It all pointed to chromosomal anomaly, but, too bad for me, it wasn't possible to get definitive diagnosis in the time frame I had to make up my mind to obtain a legal termination.

My choices were to do nothing, undergo termination with less than definitive diagnosis, or wait for the definitive diagnosis, and then go to New York or Colorado, or, I guess, Kansas.

Technology has made the chromosomal test a lot quicker than it used to be. My doctor was very helpful -- telling me to consider what I would do if the amnio cam back normal, because even if chromosomally normal, we were looking at a grim prognosis. I also had the help of a genetics counselor who told me that she often found herself in the position of trying to keep people from overreacting in the face of alarming information -- accentuating the positive, if you will, but she had to admit that in my case, there was no positive information. So we did what we could to sort out the information we had, and we realized that there was almost no chance that the baby would live.

If she lived at all, she was destined for debilitating and probably inexplicable pain and suffering (at least three and probably more major surgeries), and a short life. There would never be any surgery for her brain defect, and if she was chromosomally abnormal, most doctors would refuse to do surgery, and she would simply be allowed to die. When we scheduled the termination, they did an amnio to get the definitive diagnosis, which turned out to be a rare and unsurvivable trisomy (#22 if you are interested -- it is so rare that the geneticist got a little excited because she had never personally seen it). The last time I saw her on the sonogram screen, her heart rate had decelerated to below 100, which is abnormal for a fetus. I believe that she was sustained as far as she was by me, and that she was already starting to die.

I was haunted for a while that I had to decide before I knew for sure that death was inevitable, and once I got over the grief of having done that, the experience only deepened my belief that abortion should be the province of individual men and women. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I have concluded that a decision to undergo abortion or continue a pregnancy is often made instinctively, with a nearly primal conviction that it is the right thing to do under the circumstances. Trying to impose a rigid moral framework based on an extreme notion of equality of personhood doesn't even begin to speak to the complexities of what most people experience when trying to decide this question for themselves.

Decorating a Room for $10

A little ingenuity plus enormous talent.

When Charlie Kratzer started on the basement art project in his south Lexington home, he was surrounded by walls painted a classic cream. Ten dollars of Magic Marker and Sharpie later, the place was black and cream and drawn all over. More here.

h/t Crooks and Liars

The Meaning of Traditional Marriage

Via Donklephant

After listening to conservative religious leaders talk about preserving the 5000 years of traditional marriage between a man and a woman on NPR last week, I just had to laugh at the notion that marriage was a true reflection of family values and love. For the most part, marriages were arranged and women were considered property to be bartered like animals or land. Traditional Marriage link…

Marriage as we know it today is a partnership based on love and trust…or so we would like to believe. So why is it hard for some people to understand that contemporary marriage cannot extend itself to same sex couples? Just 40 years ago we had segregated bathrooms. There’s no doubt we have a long way to go as a society to push for equal rights for all members of the human race, I just want to set the record straight on how far we have come since the days of arranged marriages and the feudal system that in some degree still exists today.

No More Compromise

Matt Taibbi likes Obama and he wants to believe that Obama will do what he had promised. Has Obama run out of time? Is the honeymoon over? Taibbi addresses these issues in his latest article, The End of the Obama Honeymoon, Part II.

The recent haggling over Guantanamo is such classic Democratic Party politics, it's almost laughable. Almost, except that it's, you know, revolting.

The recent haggling over Guantanamo Bay is such classic Democratic Party politics, it almost makes you want to laugh. Almost, except that it’s, you know, revolting. Eight years of Clintonian squirming was bad enough, but now we have Barack Obama, smoking Habeas Corpus and not inhaling it.

Making a Decision/Not!

Why is the Gitmo decision classic Democratic Party thinking? Because when certain of us said we wanted Gitmo closed, we sort of meant a change in policy -- we didn’t mean just physically closing the plant, moving the prisoners elsewhere, and leaving the policies essentially unchanged. This is what this generation of Democrats does every time: every time they come to a fork in the road, they try to take it.

There’s always some sort of semantic twist involved with their policies, an asterisk, some kind of leprechaun trick to get around doing the simple right thing. They’re all for gay rights, and then once the lights come on, they’ve basically codified the closet by ushering in Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

They campaign against the war in Iraq, promise to get us out, and say they were against it all along -- and then once they get in power, they start using words like eventually and in 4-6 years and once the situation stabilizes. Later it turns out that what they meant by being against the war all along was their conviction that we should have invaded on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday, or some such bullshit.

The Matter of Gitmo

Now there’s this Gitmo business. This, folks, just isn’t that tough a call. The prison (and the much less publicized archipelago of hard sites in foreign countries where more terror suspects are held) was a symbol of everything wrong and stupid about the Bush administration. Snatching people up by force and dumping them in rocks on the middle of the ocean without due process is the kind of thing that was last done by "civilized" cultures back in the days of the Roman Empire; since then it’s been the exclusive province of sociopathic third-world dictators like Stalin and Mobutu Sese Seko.

It was absolutely imperative, from a public relations standpoint if nothing else, that Obama immediately repudiate these practices, design some kind of due process to deal with the already incarcerated prisoners, and show the world that what happened during the Bush years was an insane aberration, a result of our having accidentally elected an emotionally retarded sadist to the White House.

Obama's Decision/Indecision

Instead, Obama is on his way to doing exactly the wrong thing. He’s going to make a show of closing the base, but retain the underlying idea by keeping some of the prisoners in indefinite legal purgatory. In some ways this is worse than what Bush did, because Bush at least took a clear stand -- he was nuts and thought this was the right thing to do. No matter how you look at Obama’s decision, it’s weighed somewhere along the line by political calculation. Either he thinks indefinite decision is right and he’s bowing to public appeals by closing the base, or else he thinks it’s wrong and is bowing to opposition outcry by maintaining the old policy.

It’s one thing to change your mind or play both sides of the fence on matters that don’t involve human lives, on theoretical/hypothetical campaign issues, but another thing to do it with actual incarcerated human beings as the key variable in the political equation.

Better than the Alternative, But...

I still like Obama, in a lot of ways. Having a president with less ability to inspire public confidence at a time like this, with our economy in such a death spiral, would be a disaster; God knows where we’d be right now with a McCain or a Mike Huckabee at the helm. But this guy has to show some stones somewhere along the line. He has to just forget the DC game and just take a clear stand on an issue like this sometime. He’s kind of running out of time to rescue his all-important first impression.

Also See: The Official End of Obama’s Honeymoon

"Two Angry White Men."

During a segment of Andrea Mitchell's show on MSNBC, Pat Buchanan got hot and angry regarding Judge Sonia Sotomayer's comment regarding white men. After Buchanan refers to Sotomayer as "that woman," Bob Shrum tells Pat that he owes her an apology.

WATCH:

Andrea Mitchell signs off by saying, "I'm Andrea Mitchell, live in Washington, between two angry white men."

The Torture Debate

Torture is a topic that is being debated by politicians, pundits and the public. The following excerpt is from an article by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship regarding torture titled, Everyone Should See "Torturing Democracy."

In all the recent debate over torture, many of our Beltway pundits and politicians have twisted themselves into verbal contortions to avoid using the word at all. [...] No political party would dare make torture a cornerstone of its rejuvenation if people really understood what it is. And lest we forget, we're not just talking about waterboarding, itself a trivializing euphemism for drowning.

If we want to know what torture is, and what it does to human beings, we have to look at it squarely, without flinching. That's just

what a powerful and important film, seen by far too few Americans, does. "Torturing Democracy" was written and produced by one of America's outstanding documentary reporters, Sherry Jones. (Excerpts from the film are being shown on the current edition of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS - check local listings, or go to the program's web site at www.pbs.org/moyers, where you can be linked to the entire 90-minute documentary.)[...]

As the editors of The Christian Century magazine wrote this week, "Convening a truth commission on torture would b e embarrassing to the US in the short term, but in the long run it would demonstrate the strength of American democracy and confirm the nation's adherence to the rule of law.... Understandably, [the president] wants to turn the page on torture. But Americans should not turn the page until they know what is written on it."

The debate will continue as long as those who support torture continue to use fear, panic, ignorance and patriotism as their basis of justification.

Something Down The Drain?

Suck It! By Michael Davis

How to get something you dropped down the drain, without using a pipe wrench or a plumber.

An amazing trick! The 1-minute video shows you how to easily retrieve anything that went down the drain…without a pipe wrench or a plumber.

UPDATE: You must use a Wet/Dry shop vacuum. In the video, he mentions "any vacuum will do".

"Here You Have a Racist"

Media Matters has assembled a collection of the right's most unhinged, delusional reactions to Sonia Sotomayer's nomination. The Nation's editorial, The Real Sotomayor, confronts the negative right-wing smear attack against her.

The minute Judge Sonia Sotomayor rose from President Obama's shortlist for the Supreme Court to become his official nominee, the conservative smear campaign against her went from simmer to full boil. Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice repeated unsourced accusations, of the kind first made in an article by Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic, that Sotomayor is "an intellectual lightweight" who was "picked because she was a woman and Hispanic." National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru dubbed her "Obama's Harriet Miers," while his colleague Mark Krikorian whined that "putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English." Politico reported that Republicans were weighing how to attack a "Latina single mother," and Mike Huckabee claimed that "Maria Sotomayor" comes from the "far left" and would unduly let her "feelings" influence her decisions.

Every element of this right-wing assault is false. Judge Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal (as did Justice Samuel Alito). Her seventeen years of experience on federal courts vastly outstrips the combined years of experience John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas had when they were nominated--seven in total. As the author of more than 700 opinions, she has proven herself to be a pragmatic centrist cut from the same cloth as Obama. Indeed, unlike Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Justice Thurgood Marshall, she was not a central member of the legal movements to advance women's and minorities' rights. For example, she once voted down a constitutional challenge to the global gag rule on abortion. Moreover, she has on occasion disappointed progressives with rulings in favor of corporations.

Finally, it should be noted that Judge Sotomayor's first name is, in fact, Sonia and that she has no children. Of course, to a conservative movement bent on running a character assassination based on ugly racist stereotypes, these are inconvenient details.[...]

Have the conservative pundits looked in the mirror lately...?

Getting Ugly!

G. Gordon Liddy speaking as a truly sexist, racist, ignoramus! On the nomination of Sonia Sotomayer for the Supreme Court, Liddy said:

Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad....

What's too bad is that Liddy actually gets airtime to speak his tripe.

Think Progress has more:

Yesterday on his radio show, conservative host G. Gordon Liddy continued the right wing’s all-out assault on Judge Sonia Sotomayor. First, just like Tom Tancredo, Liddy slammed Sotomayor’s affiliation with the civil rights group La Raza — and referred to the Spanish language as “illegal alien“:

LIDDY: I understand that they found out today that Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, “the race.” And that should not surprise anyone because she’s already on record with a number of racist comments.

Finished with the race-based attack, Liddy moved on to denigrate Sotomayor’s gender:

LIDDY: Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.

Finally, Liddy disputed the entire idea that there’s anything wrong with the paucity of women and total lack of Hispanics on the Court:

LIDDY: And everybody is cheering because Hispanics and females have been, quote, underrepresented, unquote. And as you pointed out, which I thought was quite insightful, the Supreme Court is not designed to be and should not be a representative body.

Listen here:

Liddy and his radical colleagues, mostly on the radio, are so far failing to get the conservative leadership on board with their racist and sexist attacks. Last night, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) called the attacks “terrible” and “wrong.” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) was asked if he agreed with Newt Gingrich’s characterization of Sotomayor as a “Latina woman racist.” “No, I don’t agree with that,” Hatch replied.

Update: Read more on right-wing hate in today's Progress Report.

Update: Karen Tumulty flashes back to what Liddy's former boss, President Nixon, thought of having a woman on the Supreme Court.

GOP Wants to do away with Empathy?

On the issue of the nominee for the Supreme Court, Obama has spoken of the quality of empathy.

"I will seek someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives, whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation," Obama said. "I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes."

According to Major Garrett at Fox News, conservatives "are likely to line up against any "empathetic" Obama nominee for the Souter seat."

"President Obama has referred to this nice word empathy," says Wendy Long, legal counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network. Long clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Obama has described as one of the kinds of judges he opposes because of their lack of judicial training and lack of empathy.

"(Obama) thinks judges should have empathy for certain litigants who come before them. Of course if you have empathy for everybody who comes before you, there are two sides to every case. If you have empathy for both sides then that's the same as having no empathy at all. So what he means is he wants empathy for one side and what's wrong with that is it is being partial instead of being impartial. A judge is supposed to have empathy for no one but simply to follow the law."

However, just three and a half years ago, Republicans thought empathy was a pretty righteous quality in a Supreme Court nominee.

TPM unearths a must-watch video in which Samuel Alito says that in his rulings not only does he apply the rule of law but he explains how empathy and his own heritage play a role in his decisions.

WATCH: Alito: Have to Consider Life Experiences when Ruling Cases

h/t: The Plum Line