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...

If one lives on Capitol Hill (which happens to be the location of your blogstress's Oppo Factory), the approach of Memorial Day is marked by the relentless flatulence of the Harley Davidson motorcycle, squadrons of which besmirch the serenity of Our Nation's Capitol each year at the end of May. The two-wheeled noisemakers are invariably mounted by overweight people with bad hairdos who think it their patriotic duty to subject the citizens of Washington, D.C., to a panoply of offenses to the senses, which somehow add up, in their carbon-monoxide-addled minds, to a solemn homage to the nation's war dead. Speaking of the war, your blogstress has gone and really stepped in it by stating, on TAPPED , her opposition to a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq (even though it's the conflict she hates the most). Your comments are welcome, mes amis , but please hold the epithets.

Melissa Silverstein of the Women's Media Center has posted her first entertainment blog entry for Huffington Post , where you will be able to find her musings on culture high and low. For her opener, Melissa tells us of a new documentary about Mukhtaran Mai , the Pakistani woman who defied local authorities to prosecute the men who gang-raped her on the order of a tribal council. The case now sits before Pakistan's Supreme Court, which is having a little trouble functioning these days, what with dictator and U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf having sacked the chief justice, a move that has sparked underreported violence throughout Pakistan over the course of the last month.

Your blogstress, alas, has been much too busy making a living lately to attend to her life's work of making the world safe for libertines. For instance, she has not been able to find a minute to craft a witty take-down of Newt Gingrich 's hysterical commencement address to the 2007 class of Liberty University, part of the legacy left behind by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell . For Newt's part, the serial adulterer decried a culture of "radical secularism" that has gripped the nation. (Read more here , in an amusing piece by Michael Shear . You cybertrix prays that Newt enters the Republican presidential race. What fun that would be! On a more serious note, you'll surely want to reconsider the legacy of Rev. Falwell in light of this thoughtful op-ed piece by your écrivaine 's dear friend, Hans Johnson and his good friend, William Eskridge . The Falwell funeral will commence at 1:00 p.m. at Rev. Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church. You can watch it ...

...there's the Christian Newswire . Today, at The American Prospect Online, your blogstress shows you how the White House is using your tax dollars to add to the bottom line of a religious-right p.r. operation run by a former spokesperson for murders of doctors who perform abortions. (And you were just upset about the $1 billion spent so far to advance "abstinence-only" sex education.)

In case you did not know, dear reader, your blogstress is never more than a degree or so removed from every major story taking place in Our Nation's Capitol. Take, for instance, the imminent departure from the World Bank of Paul Wolfowitz , our man fighting corruption in the Third , er, undeveloped , er, underdeveloped , er, developing world, where he had hoped, one day, to install an Iraq-style democracy in every Godforsaken country for the betterment of Western contractors and their client states. (That would be us, as in U.S.) Oh, yes, but what of your blogstress and the Bank? Well, unfortunately, when your cybertrix worked there, she was in no position to give her girlfriend an enormous raise (though she was, from time to time, in a position that encouraged her girlfriend to assume an elevated pose). And as for your Webwench's boyfriend...well, never mind. Back when your écrivaine toiled at the Big Bank, she, like most of the American administrative help, was designate...

Posted here, without comment -- well, not much, anyway -- is the transcript of a most remarkable segment of MSNBC's "Scarborough Country," featuring the quick-minded John Ridley vs. Jersey's own Steve Adubato , who has a nice head of hair. SCARBOROUGH: It‘s unbelievable. And, you know, let me give you one more example of double standard, sort of these P.C. days. At a graduation ceremony at Howard University on Saturday, Oprah Winfrey said her grandmother told her she hoped, quote, “She would get some good white folks to work for her.” And then Oprah said to that class, “I regret she didn‘t live past 1963 and see that I did get some really good white folks working for me.” Steve Adubato, my gosh, just fill in—-pick the race, and just fill in a white person saying that about any other race, and that white person would be off the air, would they not? ADUBATO: In a heartbeat, Joe. Oprah gets away with all kinds of things because, first of all, she‘s not disgusti...

At The Guardian , now edited by former American Prospect editor Michael Tomasky , there's a terrific piece by Michelle Goldberg in which she reveals the segregationist roots of the Moral Majority salesman, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell . In today's Washington Post , Hanna Rosin offers up a generational look at the post-Falwell religious right. Among those she cites as the movement's next big things is the very scary Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Today, the Rev. Jerry Falwell bid farewell to the earthly plain and wafted into the arms of his Maker. Hopefully the Maker, presumably now in face-to-face contact with her errant son, can correct the son (as only a mother can) on his ridiculous assertion that she made the entire Universe in a week. Where, you may ask, has gone your blogstress's customarily gentle disposition toward the recently deceased? Well, mes amis , your Webwench has her human foibles with which to contend, and she has yet to transcend herself to forgive the reverend for blaming the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the likes of her and her compatriots. Let us revisit the appearance of Rev. Falwell on the television program hosted by his rival, the Rev. Pat Robertson , on September 13, 2001: JERRY FALWELL : The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this. PAT ROBERTSON : Well, yes. JERRY FALWELL : And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the h...

It's been but a month since your blogstress broke the news of Ann Coulter 's desecration of the the pulpit at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church (a desecration that brought no protest from the pulpit's owners), and, pouf!, mes amis , the Reclaiming America for Christ Center has announced that it is closing, according to the Associated Press . Your blogstress really didn't intend for such drastic consequences of her clever infiltration and subsequent bean-spilling -- really, she didn't! The other ministries of Coral Ridge are expected to survive, if Executive Vice President Brian Fisher has anything to say about it. A word to the wise: Watch out for this guy. He could be the next Ralph Reed .

Over at TAPPED, J. Goodrich has a post about a right-wing confab that had somehow escaped your blogstress's attention. Check it out.

As she so often is, your blogstress found herself moving against the tide today as she made her way toward the Capitol South subway stop just as hundreds of Hill staffers were ascending from the underground to begin their workdays. Brushing past your cybertrix was a rather rumpled Newt Gingrich , whose very presence among the throng turned a number of heads. Said the lady in the apron who hands out copies of Express , a crib sheet of AP stories produced by the Washington Post : "He looks just like he do on TV." "He sure does," answered a lady in a pants suit, dragging a briefcase on wheels. "You know," said the Express lady, "sometimes they really don't look like theyselves." Now on the escalator, your Web wench gasped as a pertly dressed woman in her 20s said to her male companion, "I wish I had told him that I want him to run for president." Your écrivaine caught her breath. Yes, perhaps it would be a good thing to have Newt ...

Bill Donohue , perhaps your blogstress's favorite bigot, has a piece at Human Events Online in which he rehashes his charge of anti-Catholicism against your écrivaine for having dared to note, in 2005, that George W. Bush 's nomination of the very Catholic John Roberts to the top spot on the high court was a smooth move. Her point was that Roberts' religion would give the right cover when the liberals on the Judiciary Committee, before which he would appear for his confirmation hearing, pushed him for his views on abortion. "Anti-Catholic!" they would cry, of anyone who dared to challenge Roberts views on Roe v. Wade . Grouping your cyberscribe among the likes of the besotted Christopher Hitchens, the probing Nina Totenberg and the saintly E.J. Dionne, he then said that none of them could surpass your blogstress in one critical area: When John Roberts was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, his Catholicism became an issue with pundits like NPR’s Nina Totenb...