From Washington, DC, It's Senator Al Franken!

Sen. Al Franken Sworn Into Office

Eric Kleefeld:

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) has now been sworn into office as the junior Senator from Minnesota, six months and one day after his term would have otherwise begun if not for the super-close election and resulting litigation that kept his victory bottled up.

2:07

The former Saturday Night Live performer, author, radio host and Democratic activist, was administered the oath of office by Vice President Joe Biden, and was accompanied by his senior Senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, and former Vice President Walter Mondale.

Franken Lands Plum Committees, to Debut at Sotomayor Hearings

Deborah White:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and top Senate Democrats have reserved high-profile committee assignments for Sen. Franken, including:

* Judiciary, headed by Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and

* Health, Education & Labor, headed by ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts

Sen. Franken was selected for these plum yet challenging committee assignments because he's both unusually bright and quite conversant on the issues. And because he's an unabashed, unashamed progressive Democrat who will undoubtedly be a reliable liberal vote and voice. [...]

Look for Sen. Franken to make his public debut as political leader on July 13th, when Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee to being hearings on her confirmation.

Below The Bottom Of The Barrel

Sotomayor Derangement Syndrome

Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court has revealed the ugly side of the Republican Party.

William Rivers Pitt:

Last week, the malady mutated into a whole new thing - Sotomayor Derangement Syndrome - and boy, but it's a doozy. Ranting incoherence, brazen racism and suicidal ideation swept through the ranks of the far right after Judge Sotomayor was nominated to replace Justice Souter on the high court, symptoms that became worse by orders of magnitude as the week wore on. By the weekend, those suffering from Sotomayor Derangement Syndrome had not only struck the bottom of the barrel in their attempts to tear the Sotomayor nomination down, but had plowed right through the wood and burrowed deep into the slime and ooze beneath. [...]

"After a week of escalating race and gender rhetoric from the right over the Sotomayor nomination, it's now looking like some in the Republican Party - those concerned with actually getting elected - have become alarmed by the political damage the more extreme members of their party may be doing and are moving to rein in the vitriol," reported Eric Kleefield of Talking Points Memo on Friday. "It's the starkest example yet of an interesting division within the right, one that has been apparent for some time, but which the Sotomayor nomination has not only crystallized but accelerated: the right-wing bomb-throwers obsessed with ideological purity versus the right-wing pragmatists who want the party to actually win election again some day."

By the end of last weekend, Sotomayor Derangement Syndrome had blown this rift within the GOP wide open. Establishment conservatives are now directly pitted against the vocal ideologues on their right flank and a GOP base that seems to be avidly listening to them. For a party already traumatized by arguments over immigration, two decisive routs in a row at the polls, and an absolute absence of any real leadership, the advent of this newest intra-party bloodbath is the worst possible situation.

Stay tuned.

Empathy, Sotomayor, and Democracy: The Conservative Stealth Strategy

George Lakoff:

The Sotomayor nomination has given radical conservatives new life. They have launched an attack that is nominally aimed at Judge Sotomayor. But it is really a coordinated stealth attack - on President Obama's central vision, on progressive thought itself, and on Republicans who might stray from the conservative hard line. [...]

Actually, something sneakier and possibly dangerous is going on.

Let's start with the attack on empathy. Why empathy? Isn't empathy a good thing?

Empathy is at the heart of progressive thought. It is the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of others - not just individuals, but whole categories of people: one's countrymen, those in other countries, other living beings, especially those who are in some way oppressed, threatened, or harmed. Empathy is the capacity to care, to feel what others feel, to understand what others are facing and what their lives are like. Empathy extends well beyond feeling to understanding, and it extends beyond individuals to groups, communities, peoples, even species. Empathy is at the heart of real rationality, because it goes to the heart of our values, which are the basis of our sense of justice.

Progressives care about others as well as themselves. They have a moral obligation to act on their empathy - a social responsibility in addition to personal responsibility, a responsibility to make the world better by making themselves better. This leads to a view of a government that cares about its citizens and has a moral obligation to protect and empower them. Protection includes worker, consumer, and environmental protection as well as safety nets and health care. Empowerment includes what is in the president's stimulus plan: infrastructure, education, communication, energy, the availability of credit from banks, a stock market that works. No one can earn anything at all in this country without protection and empowerment by the government. All progressive legislation is made on this basis. [...]

Empathy in this sense is a threat to conservatism, which features individual, not social, responsibility and a strict, punitive form of "justice." It is no surprise that empathy would be a major conservative target in the Sotomayor evaluation.

But the target is not empathy as it really exists. Instead, the conservatives are reframing empathy to make it attackable. [...]

Taken together, the attacks on Sotomayor work as attacks on Obama and progressive thought. They are also attacks on "moderate" conservatives, who think with progressives on many issues. [...]

How should Democrats respond?

Democrats should go on offense. They need to rally behind empathy- real empathy, not empathy reframed as emotion and personal feeling. They need to speak regularly about empathy as being the basis of our democracy. They need to point out that empathy leads one to notice real social and systemic causes of our troubles and to notice when and how judicial decisions and legislation can harm the most vulnerable of our countrymen. And finally that empathy is the reason that we have the principles of freedom and fairness - which are necessary components of justice.

Above all, Democrats should be aware that the attack on Sotomayor is not just about Sotomayor. It is an attack on the basis of our democracy and must be answered.

Today's Lesson

New York teacher gives Democrats radio address

AP:

Democrats tapped a teacher from upstate New York to make the case that their party will do more for working Americans than Republicans will.

Jeff Alberici, an eighth-grade history teacher in Auburn, N.Y., was chosen to deliver the Democrats' Saturday radio address - an unusual choice for a weekly task usually performed by elected officials. [snip]

Alberici said he supports Democrats because they "understand what families like ours are going through, and they're trying to make things better."

Republicans, Alberici said, "haven't offered much of anything. In fact, Republicans are spending their time blocking Democrats from getting anything done at all," including several recent bills that Democrats contend would lower energy costs.

One bill that would have ended tax breaks for big oil companies and imposed a windfall tax on their profits was blocked by Senate Republicans. Days earlier, a bill aimed at curbing global warming was defeated.

"Republicans only want more of the same old ideas that got us into this mess in the first place," said Alberici. "More of the same isn't working for my family, and I bet it's not working for yours."

In order to promote unity I've deleted a post.

I wrote a post highly critical of Hillary Clinton based on a personal experience I had four years ago. It disturbed a longtime contributor to this board (and Hillary supporter) enough that she asked to be removed as a contributor.

While I still hold the opinions I expressed, and people who want to read the post can do so here, I decided to remove it from this blog, recognizing that in the fall we will all have to unite behind the nominee, whoever it is (i.e. that half a party is certainly a losing party).

It might also be worth noting that last October I wrote a post stating flatly that if Hillary Clinton is the nominee then I would support her even though I disagree with much of what she has done in the Senate.

Taking Care Of The Troops

The proposed Bush budget calls for a reduction in veteran health care two years from now, followed by three years of freezes... in addition to the cuts veterans have already suffered.

Yet, the government is not even taking good care of our veterans now: read about the shocking and deplorable conditions our returning injured troops endure at Walter Reed and the bungling bureaucratic treatment of veterans who suffer from brain injuries, severed arms and legs, organ and back damage, and various degrees of post-traumatic stress. Read the moving account of a Marine's suicide who was made to wait for PTSD treatment.

And this is how the pro-war "support the surge" Republic Party continues to NOT support our troops:

After repeatedly spinning their pre-approved talking points (PDF) to stall voting, and in spite of the fact that the nonbinding resolution specifically does support our troops, the Republic Party in the Senate foiled the Dems' bid to repudiate the Iraq surge:

The 56-34 vote fell four short of the 60 needed to advance a nonbinding measure identical to one the House passed Friday. [snip]

The nonbinding measure consisted of fewer than 100 words. It disapproved of Bush's decision to deploy more troops and pledged to support and protect the troops in the field. [snip]

"The Senate will keep fighting to force President Bush to change course," Reid said at a news conference after the vote.

In the House, Democrats have said they will attempt to place restrictions on Bush's request for an additional $93 billion for the military in an effort to make it impossible for him to deploy all 21,500 additional troops.

It makes you wonder:

How can any patriotic American support a regime that has shredded the US Constitution, ignored the separation of powers, violated the Geneva Conventions, forced through a law legalizing torture, launched a war of aggression that has produced 26,000 American military casualties in service of a lie, murdered tens or hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians, destroyed an entire country, and planned an attack on Iran, perhaps with nuclear weapons?

It’s time to simply admit the obvious:

The president of the United States is crazy as a loon, and the Congress and the media are functioning as co-dependents as he runs the country off a cliff. [snip]

This seems to be the attitude in Congress and the media. The Democrats, who could put the president in a richly deserved straightjacket, are afraid to take that step. The media are afraid the president and his crazy backers would howl if they pointed out how nutty he has become.

So they all let him rant on, as though he were making sense.

The problem is that this president is also the commander in chief. He has ordered three heavily armed (and nuclear-equipped) carrier battle groups to the Persian Gulf and is talking about “dealing” with Iran. We all know what that means. He wants to attack Iran and expand his disastrous war in the Middle East to put us at war with another 70 million people.

Bush Does Democrats

A sidebar to Barbi's post below. Notice the look of rapture on Rahm's face in the first photo.