AddieStan

The Supreme Court's decision of yesterday, sticking a sword in the side of Brown v. Board of Education , demands comment far more informed and considered than your blogstress is, at the moment, capable of making, given her current condition the day after a tooth extraction that did not go well. With her mind clouded by painkillers, your cybertrix leaves it those more lucid than she to shed light on the misdeeds of the Roberts court. The best your ecrivaine has to offer is a comment made by Jonathan Turley of the George Washington University School of Law on Wednesday's edition of NPR's syndicated "The Diane Rehm Show," during which he described Chief Justice John Roberts of looking like something that was "grown hydroponically by Karl Rove."

Your blogstress hopes those good Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee who voted for the nomination of John Roberts to the post of chief justice of the Supreme Court are pleased with themselves in light of the First Amendment decisions handed down by the Supreme Court yesterday – decisions that bear the hallmarks of the new chief that Sens. Feingold, Kohl and Leahy so graciously endorsed. If you were dismayed by yesterday’s outcome in the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case or perplexed by the conclusion the court arrived at yesterday in the campaign finance case, your Webwench asks you to consider the court’s decision in the in the case regarding taxpayer standing in church/state separation, which either throws out 30 years of law once believed to be settled, or confers on the executive branch the right to spend your tax dollars on pretty much anything it damn well pleases. Most coverage has focused on the Court’s apparent upset of the precedent that once was Flast v. Cohen , the 1969 ca...

How can you tell if a person's -- or an institution's -- opposition to abortion is simple misogyny, or is based on a sincere belief that abortion is the killing of a human being? Look to the person's -- or institution's -- position on birth control. If you really thought human life to begin at conception, and you wanted to reduce the number of abortions, you would support artificial contraception, no? And so it is that your blogstress has come to the sad conclusion that the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, the church of her baptism and upbringing, find the justification for their bullying behavior on abortion in their disdain for women -- evidenced, as well, by their pathological need to keep women out of the ecclesiastical club. Today we find the bishops at it again, picking on poor Rudy Giuliani, who apparently has not had a bad enough week, what with the revelation that the Hero Mayor of 911 New York couldn't manage to make it to those inconveniently sche...

A little ethnic humor from the Take Back America conference: "Nancy Pelosi is the most powerful Italian since Julius Caesar." --Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass. "I'm one-third white, one-third Cherokee and one-third African. I could write my own reparations check." --Connie Rice, NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund More to come, mes amis .

Poor John Edwards ; he has to follow Barack Obama with his speech at the Take Back America conference in Washington, D.C. For those of you with lives, who live outside the political game show that is your blogstress's adopted city, TBA is an annual confab convened by an organization called the Campaign for America's Future . Had he not followed Obama, Edwards' speech would have been a right good speech. But since Obama left the stage, it's all I can do not to notice that the delicate hairs that add an otherworldly shimmer to your blogstress's arms are no longer standing up, or that it is once again safe for your blogstress to wear mascara, since she is no longer weeping in awe -- or that she is again capable of blogging during a speech, something she found impossible during Obama's. Edwards has a program. He has brains. He has nice hair and a good tan. But Obama's got the mojo.

The Taliban are once again making their presence known in Afghanistan, as evidenced by this morning's suicide bombing in Kabul. With Pakistan in a highly unstable state since the ouster of the chief justice of Pakistan's high court by the nation's self-appointed leader, we stand on the verge of losing Afghanistan -- if it is not lost already.

Michael Tomasky , your blogstress's former bossman at The American Prospect , and now the bossman of Guardian America, has a provocative piece up at the latter Web site, explaining why (perish the thought) a President Giuliani is not out of the question.

Your blogstress notes with great pleasure the citation of her take-down of the Reclaiming America for Christ conference by the estimable Bill Berkowitz on Talk to Action. Beyond quoting your cybertrix, Berkowitz has an interesting piece on the sudden closures of several political "ministries" of Rev. D. James Kennedy , who is apparently so incompacitated by a heart attack he suffered last December that he has not been heard from publicly since. When the slate of conservative dream-teamers joined some 1,300 attendees at this year's Reclaiming America for Christ conference in early March, few in the crowd could have predicted that within two months the gathering's high-powered sponsoring organization would shut its doors. In late April, that's exactly what D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries did when they announced they were closing the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ. Speculation on the reasons for the closures initially focused on the failing...