10. He’s still too upset that he never received any endorsement money from the Coca-Cola people

9. He tried talking once, but Scalia was drinking a glass of water at the same time and Scalia’s not that talented

8. He took Thurgood Marshall’s seat, and he knows if he opens his mouth, the contrast will be too disheartening

7. He refuses to say anything until Anita Hill apologizes

6. Five years ago, Thomas and Kennedy said the word “jurisprudence” at the same time, Kennedy shouted “Jinx!”…and nobody has spoken Thomas’s name since

5. He’s studying to be a mime (though some people might be insulted if they see him wearing whiteface)

4. He’s obsessed by the pubic hairs he can spot all over that big table they sit at

3. After failing to mention on his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms that his wife earned $686,589 from the conservative Heritage Foundation, he thought, “Who am I to judge?”

2. He finds all that power a turn-on, and he’s afraid, if he talks, people might notice his robe is tenting

1. He’s saving all his best rhetoric for the scheduled Supreme Court obscenity case U. S. v. Long Dong Silver
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, ends & odd, on the law, politics & government by Bob Sullivan
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Tags: politics & government by Alexander Thorburn Hoffman
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The rats have fled. In Wisconsin and now in Indiana, Democrats who have been shellacked into a piddling minority have screwed up their little faces in rage, taken their balls and gone home. Well, they have not gone home, but they have gone. Evidence indicates that they favor the Land of Lincoln for their refuge for reasons unknown except that here they are beyond the reach of state troopers set on their trail. But their solidarity cracks. One Wisconsin Senator is heavily pregnant. Her needs threaten her resolve. Another declares that the legislated end to direct deposit (a brutal Republican maneuver) puts his escape in jeopardy since his means are slight and life on the lam, expensive. One Tim Cullen has publicly flirted with surrender but been talked out of it. He exists now in a state of quantum ambiguity across State lines, like Schrodinger’s Cat, neither here nor there, neither alive nor dead. In any case the cowardice, dereliction and pure stubborn depravity of these traitors has thrown a broomstick into the spokes of democracy. We should thank them.

Democracy was held in low regard by the bright, drunken fellows who founded our country and drafted our earliest laws. [Read more →]

Tags: on the law, politics & government by Ken Watson
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Another dram of history: Mr Obama, or perhaps Mrs Obama, or perhaps Valerie Jarrett has smashed yet another glass ceiling kept so spotless you probably didn’t know it existed. We refer of course to the hiring of an openly gay man as Social Secretary at the White House. The purity of this latest First is somewhat at issue though. The office of Social Secretary, while venerable, is not mentioned in the Constitution. Its history is not well recorded. Like so many curious things Presidential, it owes its current sacred status to the gunning down of William McKinley which begat the raising up of Teddy Roosevelt. But until yesterday this swanky, demanding post had never been held by a man. Now, this is not much of a First for fans of Firsts especially as this lucky fellow, Jeremy Bernard, is about as white as they come except that he is no Republican. He is however a prominent homosexual, which counts for Firsts, I guess, except that since the job is approving doilies and judging chintz you might doubt it if they said he WASN’T gay, but just hiring a white guy with good penmanship and a glad hand wouldn’t be much of a breakthrough, at least not on par with the other Firsts we have seen. Probably Bernard’s status as a multi-million dollar campaign contribution bundler was most persuasive, if we are being fair. But paying off a crony is no kind of First and if we are being truthful we would say what everyone paying attention knows; our Second Black President has hired our First (Openly) Gay Male Social Secretary as part of a coordinated and transparent sop to a restive element of his base. [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government, race & culture by Ken Watson
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If you were a young man in Arizona in the eighties, you know Dave Pratt. He is much in the mold of a Howard Stern but local and more musically oriented. Dave Pratt and his Sex Machine band were big mouthed trout in this smallish pond but they did have one break-out national hit, the comic masterpiece Drop it on Khadaffy. As radio’s ‘Wild One’ Pratt was a man of his times. The infectious licks and Middle Eastern hooks wedded to open, violent assertion of US interests was hugely popular. It is probably needless to say, if you think about it, that this song that encourages the airstrikes on Libya of 1986 was actually a RESPONSE to those actions. It is a safe bet that Dave Pratt, like most of his audience and demographic was as ignorant of Libya’s existence as they were of its troublesome habits until American jets kicked up a goodly amount of dust there. [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government, terror & war by Ken Watson
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Israel sits on some disputed real estate. Perhaps you had heard. The vigor with which it is disputed is somewhat curious given that it is tiny, mostly desert and in a pretty rough neighborhood. Indeed it is the neighbors who press their claims. The claimants are arab and muslim. The holders are jewish and jewish. Yes, there are arabs and muslims in Zion but if they are loyal Zionists they keep that to themselves. Israel is a jewish nation for a jewish people who are about as religious as any western people which is to say some are not at all and some are devoutly so. There have been many, many denunciations of this state of affairs as some sort of racism and yes, it IS some sort of racism. It is the sort of racism practiced by a race that is threatened with extinction every day by explicitly racist actors with apocalyptic religious tastes of their own.

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Tags: politics & government, race & culture by Ken Watson
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It is wearying to mention Wisconsin so let’s mention it not. It’s unnecessary because those events are not exceptional, actually, but for scale and location. The struggle there is just one beach head in the constant, global and universal struggle. A tiny tendril of that struggle touched down here in Atlanta yesterday as a noisy bussed in scrum of unionists faced a smaller, carpooled scrum of flag wavers across the intersection in front of the Georgia capitol. I can’t say that I attended although that was my intention. For me it was just a three or four block walk. Approaching I could tell my side by the abundance of Carhartt’s and posterboard signs. I could tell the other by their red t-shirts and glossy-stock signs. The unionists numbered maybe 200 and the anti-unionists half that so this was less than a political Woodstock. An earlier scheduled event for and against a referendum on Sunday liquor sales (I’m pro) was a bit larger.

I didn’t stop. I didn’t break stride. I walked past my guys and their guys at the same camel-esque speed and blinked at them as if I had no idea what I had stumbled upon at all and walked straight to the bar. So I guess I am a deserter. [Read more →]

Tags: language & grammar, politics & government by Ken Watson
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Another politician goes down because he doesn’t understand the social network.  Jeff Cox, former deputy attorney general of Indiana, responded to a question by a writer for MotherJones about riot squads being readied in Wisconsin.  The guy tweeted “Use Live Ammunition”.

What a dumb thing to say.

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Tags: politics & government by Mike McGowan
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In other words, he ain’t cavin’. Apologies to the Gov for the last column and its presumptions as to his character. Given his RINO-esque whitewashing of the protests as “civil and nonviolent” when they were anything but, I thought he might be looking for an out, especially one that could deliver all of his legislativegoals immediately just not permanently. It looks like Walker has no interest in such a maneuver even though it could relieve the assault on Madison today while tripping up the Democrats at a crucial point two years from now.

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Tags: money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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Just what was that all about last December? How is it that two years after Obama’s election he and the Legislature had to wrestle with Bush’s Evil and Foolish Tax Giveaways to the Rich (as once we knew them)? Memories long and deep recall that this Stimulus of Yesteryear could only be passed, even in a Republican majority, with a Sunset Clause.

It’s sometimes hard to keep up with all these corny euphemisms and that is a large part of their charm to our Legislators. All this means is that the subject law, unlike most, has an expiration date. For the Bush Era Tax Rates (their new handle) the date was set for last New Year’s Day. On that day, absent the extension so long and bitterly fought over, income taxes would have gone up for all payers some ten percent. The reasons for the time limit? These were variable. For the most part it was understood that cutting the tax rates were an emergency measure to avoid a deep recession after 911. That danger would certainly be passed in ten years, right? Right. And we couldn’t deprive the Treasury of those precious funds indefinitely. But much of the appeal at least for those Democrats enticed by the Clause was that it would limit the political positives accruing to the grinning cowboy from his triumph today and lay a mine field for Republicans tomorrow as they presumed, so hopefully, that over time the legislation would grow as unpopular with the country as it was with themselves. That didn’t quite go as planned, did it? No, as it happened even a Legislature where the Democrats were in firm control could not do what they had to do to rid us of these dangerous and foolish tax policies and all they had to do was sit on their hands. [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government by Ken Watson
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Scott Walker began his tenure as Governor of Wisconsin on January 3, 2011. In this month and a fortnight he has ginned up a fiscal crisis, driven off his dedicated opponents and now promises devastations of Mubarak-esque extremity, all the while tending a jaunty little moustache of a style not seen since 1947. This is the publicly expressed view of the larger throng demonstrating lately in Madison. It is in many regards complimentary of the Governor as it implies that he has powers of pursuasion and deception on the scale of some comic book telepath. And maybe he does? He’s looked pretty good on TV. Maybe he is exercising supernatural or technological powers. We at least owe it to the numerous people of Good Faith thronging the Capitol to take their concerns and views seriously.

So the criminal Walker has cooked the books. He must have used some recent innovation given the speed and thoroughness of the deed as he has also taken in his Democratic predecessor who sat in his chair up until January 2. Also we might well have a more-or-less explicit admission by Walker as he has never once claimed that he “inherited” this fictive deficit (claimed to be $3.6b over a two year budget) allegedly so terrible and immediate. This is the deafening silence of a dog that didn’t bark. [Read more →]

Tags: money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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Public employees protested hard, loud, and ugly in the Wisconsin State Capitol this week. Many of them teachers who called in sick. State Democrats just picked up and left the state. All this to stop legislation that would limit collective bargaining rights for unionized public employees. Governor Scott Walker has to address a $3.6 billion state shortfall before the state becomes insolvent and no one gets paid. The Republican governor decided to cut an expenditure, which,  after some post-protest concessions, essentially just curbs state pensions. He can do that or raise taxes on the majority of Wisconsinites who pay for their own pensions. Which would you do? [Read more →]

Tags: education, politics & government by Robert O'Hara
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Now the line is that of course the teachers are glad to make concessions, even those as large as Walker asks for, they just want their dignity. They just want a voice. They just want to have a right to input into these decisions. That is all. As stated this all sounds quite, as the Walkerism goes, “modest” but the sweet, empty innocence of this bleat reveals that either these people have never been employed out in The World or perhaps they were and ran off screaming in afright of it. My fellow K&S veterans, current and retired might recall all the input and voice and dignity occurring two years ago come March the Tenth. [Read more →]

Tags: money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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Bioethicists – the people who specialize in deciding the thorniest moral issues of this ever-changing world in which we live in – all agree that, if genetic testing reveals the propensity of a patient to develop a life-threatening catastrophic disease, that patient should not be told. The burden of such knowledge is too great for people to handle.

This is basic common sense, of course, and human beings have known this since time immemorial. One needs only look at the Bible, in which Adam and Eve are admonished by no less an authority than God himself to not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Too much knowledge, you see, can be a dangerous thing. Even if you are in a crowd of merely one or two people.

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Tags: politics & government, technology by Ricky Sprague
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Spider-Man has joined the Fantastic Four. Actually, he’s joined something called “The Future Foundation.” One member of the Fantastic Four, Johnny Storm AKA the Human Torch, was recently “rebooted to the curb.” And, although the Fantastic Four is no longer calling itself “the Fantastic Four,” they still needed “a fourth.” Hence, the inclusion of Spider-Man.

There are a number of disturbing aspects of this story. It is one of cynicism, corporatism, and psychosexual braggadocio. I intend to touch on all of these aspects in the compelling and thought-provoking essay below. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, politics & government by Ricky Sprague
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I was looking for information about the massive national debt expansions proposed by the new budget deficit, which I believe to be one of the most important issues of our time. But so many of the headlines right now are about Lady Gaga. The following was the only reasonable course of action:

Tags: art & entertainment, politics & government by Kevin R. Breen
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Thousands of American soldiers have died and continue to die in Afghanistan and Iraq. The country also faces a debt crisis caused in large part by defense spending. It would seem that from these obvious observations that America should stay out of the Middle East for a while. But in light of recent events, not getting involved might be harder than you think. [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government by Robert O'Hara
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I was fairly incensed the first time I heard Sen. DeMint exclaim “You aren’t a fiscal conservative unless you’re a social conservative”.  I was even more upset by the reporting from the week’s biggest story in the fight for GLTG equality: CPAC and GOProud.  Apparently there are several groups out there, ranging from the Heritage Foundation to the Capital Research Center, which are vehemently opposed to allowing GLTG people claim the mantle of “conservative” and they decided to make that sentiment known at this year’s event.

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Tags: politics & government by Mike McGowan
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Well, it’s official. The fair state of Utah is infested with Morons. No, not Mormons. Morons, with a capital M.  And here I thought Utah was an anomalous state, filled with ginger-headed polygamists living in red rock compounds with bonneted child brides, but it really is just like the rest of America— which is to say, teeming with gun-crazy morons.

What is worse, many of these morons are serving in the top legislative bodies of our government. The state senate of Utah, exemplary as ever, is thick with them. I think we can fairly gauge the national discourse by the sentiments expressed by Republican state Senator Mark Madsen, regarding yesterday’s final approval of a bill to make the Browning M1911 semi-automatic pistol the “State Firearm” of Utah:

“I think it is a symbol of freedom and empowerment. I think in the balance of history, much more good has been done by free people using firearms than evil done by evildoers wielding firearms,” Madsen said. “I know there is an effort to make it a symbol of negative, I just don’t buy into the propaganda.”

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Tags: politics & government by Peter Mann
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When Gawker.com celebrated its new layout by breaking a story about a married congressman’s scandal with a woman on Craigslist, his future looked bleak.

But now former Republican representative from New York Christopher Lee’s prospects are looking good. Below are four ways the disgraced politician can benefit from the scandal. [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government by Kevin R. Breen
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