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From Real Time Oct. 16, 2009. Bill reminds us that just because George Bush is gone, comedians still have plenty to work with thanks to the crazy that is the Republican Party.

Maher: It turns out there were plenty of ridiculous Republicans behind him that we just couldn't see.

Unfortunately, Scalia's right. According to the rule of after-discovered evidence (I became familiar with it when I was a reporter and covering a similar case), an innocent man can still be put to death if the evidence that could have exonerated him should have been brought forth during the original trial. There are exceptions, but that's the gist:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ordered a federal trial court in Georgia to consider the case of Troy Davis, who is on death row in state prison there for the 1989 murder of an off-duty police officer. The case has attracted international attention, and 27 former prosecutors and judges had filed a brief supporting Mr. Davis.

Seven of the witnesses against Mr. Davis have recanted, and several people have implicated the prosecution’s main witness as the actual killer of the officer, Mark MacPhail.

The Supreme Court’s decision was unsigned, only a paragraph long and in a number of respects highly unusual. It instructed the trial court to “receive testimony and make findings of fact” about whether new evidence clearly established Mr. Davis’s innocence. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who joined the court this month, did not participate.

The decision set off a sharp debate between Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia about Supreme Court procedure, the reach of a federal law meant to limit death row appeals and the proper treatment of claims of innocence.

“The substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death,” Justice Stevens wrote in a concurrence joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, “clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an evidentiary hearing.”

Justice Scalia, in a dissent joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, said the hearing would be “a fool’s errand,” because Mr. Davis’s factual claims were “a sure loser.”

He went on to say that the federal courts would be powerless to assist Mr. Davis even if he could categorically establish his innocence.

“This court has never held,” Justice Scalia wrote, “that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

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Even after showing a poll which shows that the majority of the opposition to the President is comprised of Southern, white, older men and white Evangelicals, and after playing some of the over the top attacks on President Obama by the likes of Zell Miller and Rush Limbaugh, Matthews still chooses to frame the first part of his panel debate this way.

Matthews: Did the Sotomayor nomination, the combinization of all those discussions about the wise Latina woman and how she'd be a Justice, did the discussion by the President where he talked about the sergeant in Cambridge acting stupidly, did he open the door to this sort of ethnic attack on him? An attack on his very legitimacy?

What astounded me about the panel's response is not one of them bothered to mention that maybe it is their job to beat back at this nonsense. While acknowledging the right wing lunacy, they all seemed to feign helplessness with what to do about it. None of them stated clearly that the Sotomayor nomination or the Gates dust up nonsense was not a legitimate reason for the right wing to be going ballistic at these town halls, and with the over the top racial attacks on President Obama.

John Heilemann is dead wrong. The President did not give them a "permission slip" to act this way, and it is in no way "unintentional" that they wanted to open the door to racial attacks. They were already looking for any excuse to do it and whether it was Sotomayor or Gates or whatever, this would have happened sooner or later because the haters simply will never accept that a black man was elected President in the United States.

This is the Sarah Palin nut jobs gone wild, morphed into the tea baggers movement, and it is about hate, pure and simple. End of story. And unfortunately I don't think these people are going to stop until someone ends up dead, and even that may not stop them.

Continue reading »

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Judge Sonia Sotomayor was sworn in as the 111th Justice of the Supreme Court at the Supreme Court of the United States. Chief Justice John Roberts administered the Judicial Oath in the East Conference Room before a small gathering of Judge Sotomayor’s family and friends.

From The Daily Show:

Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed as America's newest Supreme Court justice, but John McCain doesn't think her excellent resume and inspiring life story qualifies her.

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Rachel Maddow corrects Pat Buchanan's racist statements he made on her show last week. Classy as usual, she manages to do it without attacking Buchanan, but just pointing out the fact that he lies like a rug by debunking his B.S..lol.

Maddow: It's not cool to talk about guests after their segment is over. It's also not fair to re-litigate these arguments in the absence of one of the parties who participated in the argument, and I will not try to do that now. But what I do feel obliged to do is to correct some of the things that were said in the course of my argument with Pat that were stated as fact, that were not true. I feel an obligation just to correct the factual record as we would with anything else that was stated as fact on this show that was not true.

Rachel goes on to debunk Pat's statements about whether Sotomayor has ever written anything in terms of a law review article, how Sotomayor got on the Yale Law Review, that the United States was not "built by white folks", his statements about who died for the United States in combat, his statement that he was not in favor of affirmative action, when he himself promoted affirmative action for Catholics, that the United States track team in the Olympics is not "all black folks", and the Olympic hockey team is not all from Minnesota.

What if everyone on the Senate Judiciary Committee took a Jack Nicholson pill?

Open Thread below...

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Pat Buchanan continues hurling insults from his racist screed at Human Events at Sonia Sotomayor, this time on PBS's The McLaughlin Group. At least Eleanor Clift was there to attempt to keep him in check. Here are Buchanan's remarks from the segment.

Oh no she did not. She has said this six or seven times. I take the woman at her word. I believe her. I don't know why she didn't come out and defend all the experience she had, she thinks the richness of her experience had, she thought she would be an even better judge. Instead John what she did is she sat there and gave this rehearsed, robotic performance, you know, not being engaged.

It was like a junior in college who just wants to get through the oral exams on a pass fail basis. He doesn't want to get high honors, and that's what she did and quite frankly I think she diminished herself as a figure because she's a very passionate and intense person. She does believe in race based and ethic based advancement and promotion for purposes of diversity. And she didn't come off that way. I think she came off basically as look, this is Mr. Obama's choice as a Justice, and if that's what you want fine. And here's a guy, Obama, who voted against John Roberts to the Supreme Court and appointed this lady who really does not look like she fits up to Roberts' standards.

[.....]

Well, here's the problem in my view with it, and where I think the Republicans did a good job in some cases. Her whole life, I mean she goes to Princeton, first thing she does she sends a letter to HEW that they don't have enough Hispanic professors. They bring her in affirmative action to Yale. You know, they attack the Yale administration. She denounces the Bakke decision with a group of students. Her whole life....according to the New York Times!!! (crosstalk) But is she going to rule that way on the Supreme Court?

[.....]

But Mort, she comes off as Sam Alito's little sister. A strict constructionist, and I'm you know, oh yeah this law and order type. That is not why she was picked. She's a passionate Latino woman who is a liberal and I think frankly I would like to see more of her be herself.

[.....]

She'll be good for Republicans on the court in this sense because I think she is really the other, the other Sotomayor, and not the one we saw there. I think she's going to be passionate, intense. I think she's going to come down hard on affirmative action. That's what we want. If you've got a liberal judge on the court let them be like Wild Bill Douglas.

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During CNN's State of the Union, Pat Leahy tells Jeff Sessions to stop the racial politics when he attacks Sonia Sotomayor's work for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Education Fund. Given Sessions' openly racist background, I'd say Leahy went easy on him.

KING: Senator Sessions, do you have any doubt if a Roe v. Wade- type case comes before the court that she is a vote for abortion rights?

SESSIONS: Well, it does seem that way. The organization she was involved with, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, had filed a number of very aggressive briefs in the case...

KING: Now, she says she was an advocate in those days and that was her job.

SESSIONS: Well, that's all right. But they -- I mean, she voluntarily joined and was on the board and her organization advocated that the federal Constitution required that it pay for abortions and the group also opposed any parental consent laws on abortions. So I would assume that that answer was where she will be.

KING: And...

LEAHY: You know...

KING: Go ahead.

LEAHY: ... first off, let me clear up one thing. No one in the White House suggested to me what questions I should ask or I shouldn't ask. And had they done that, I would have just hung up the phone.

I made it very clear in talking to my fellow Democrats on there, you ask any questions you want. We're not there -- it's not the White House conducting this nomination hearing, it's the United States Senate. So nobody had any restrictions on what to ask.

But I would hope that people would not think we picked a Supreme Court justice on just one issue, the issue of abortion. I voted for Supreme Court justices who I'm sure totally disagree with the idea of having abortion legal, just as I voted for some who disagree with the idea of making all abortions illegal. That should not be the issue.

And the idea of trying to say, well, you know, she was on the Puerto Rican defense thing and so we have to ask some questions about that, I hope we don't go back to the day when we used to have African- Americans up for confirmation and say, yes, but you belong to the NAACP, so, you know, we're really suspicious of you.

Come on. Stop the racial politics. This is a person...

SESSIONS: Well, come on, Pat, you...

LEAHY: No, no, no, but...

SESSION: I want to disagree on that.

LEAHY: ... that's what it comes across. That's what it comes across. It comes across...

(CROSSTALK)

SESSIONS: Make them...

LEAHY: ... that if you belong to a group that tries to help Hispanics, help them in school, help them in other things, somehow you're suspicious. The same arguments were used against Thurgood Marshall and others. I think it's wrong.

The fact is, she has had more experience on the federal bench than any other nominee, and certainly, Jeff, since you and I have been...

(CROSSTALK) SESSIONS: But, Pat, I want to correct something. No Republican leader said she was a bigot. You've overstated that. There's nothing wrong with us asking about her...

LEAHY: I was talking about Newt Gingrich.

SESSIONS: Her (INAUDIBLE) views about positions -- legal positions that she took as a member of any organization. That's a normal thing to do. And I don't think that was unfair. She said that she thought she was fairly treated. Other commentators, objective leaders, civil rights leaders have said that.

We gave our absolute best to make sure this was a fair hearing, but it had to be vigorous. We had to ask about things that people cared about, her speeches, her prior pleadings that she did and some of her decisions, which are troubling.

But, Pat, you gave us a fair hearing. I appreciate that. A lot of people felt we were pretty tight on time, but you -- when the hearing came up, we had an opportunity. And I appreciate that.

KING: Gentlemen, we're about to run out of time.

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Ugghh..I thought the only place I was going to see this woman's face was on CNN. MSNBC's Carlos Watson brings in Pat's sister Bay Buchanan to regurgitate his talking points on Sonia Sotomayor. Apparently one racist Buchanan on the air just isn't enough for MSNBC.

The blogosphere and groups like American's Voice have been wondering why MSNBC employs such a racist asshole like Pat Buchanan. His behavior during the Sonia Sotomayor hearing s has been reprehensible. White supremacy has always been his mantra and he's been given a license to spew his hatred at an alarming pace. We expect this type of thinking to be displayed on FOX News, but then you listen to what Alex Castellanos says on a daily basis on CNN:

Alex Castellanos, a GOP strategist and CNN contributor, said Obama may be taking the country back to the era of identity politics.

"He didn't play that card in the campaign, he fought against that. And he said we're now at a new place," he said. "And now the question is ... is he taking us back to identity politics saying that someone is a better judge because of their race or their gender or their ethnicity?

...and you realize a simple truth. This is what the conservative movement has to offer. There are no thinkers that can get beyond the race barrier and their hatred for all minorities is palpable. The Sonia Sotomayor hearings reveals this in epic fashion. Here's Pat trying to defend his hatred with Maddow.

BUCHANAN: Affirmative action is to increase diversity by discriminating against white males. As Alan Bakke was discriminated at the University of California at Davis; As Brian Weber, that worker in Louisiana was discriminated against; As Frank Ricci and those firefighters were discriminated against; As Jennifer Gratz, was discriminated against and kept out of the University of Michigan which she set her heart on, even though her grades were far higher than people who were aloud in there. That's the type-affirmative action is basically reverse discrimination against white males and it's as wrong as discrimination against black females and Hispanics and others. And that's why I oppose it.

Gasbag racists like Buchanan, who have lived an elitist life with never any worries about eating food and supporting their families actually thinks he knows what it's like to be a working class family in America. Take away his elitist gifts and let him live in the real world for a year and let's see what happens.

Pat Buchanan is the affirmative action conservative talker for MSNBC because who's left to choose from? Michael Savage. The choices they are left with are extreme right wing radio talk show jocks. So the only reason he's on there airwaves is because they needed to fill that slot. What do you call that, Pat?

Here's a petition to ask MSNBC to fire him: Ask MSNBC to Fire Pat Buchanan

Even Villagers like Bob Shrum are freaked by Uncle Pat's racism.

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During what was at times a bit of a heated exchange, but way too chummy in general -- given the type of browbeating Pat Buchanan actually deserves for his continued racist remarks on MSNBC -- Rachel Maddow ends up telling Pat Buchanan to quit living in the 1950s, and that he's fanning the flames of racial hatred with his rhetoric. Before that, she gives him ample opportunity to put on full display, again, just how horribly he thinks the poor, downtrodden white man is being treated in America.

Some of Pat’s "finer" moments during the interview.

-- Comparing Sonia Sotomayor to Harriet Miers.

-- Calling her a purely affirmative action candidate by the President and completely dismissing her academic accomplishments.

-- Saying that “white folks” built this country.

-- Calling Bork and Scalia “real scholars” and "tremendous minds" and saying Sotomayor hasn’t risen to their level.

-- Saying the only reason she was appointed to the bench was because of affirmative action.

-- Complaining about Sotomayor getting a chance to go to the best schools and knocking out someone who might have gotten better grades than her. When has Pat Buchanan ever complained about the likes of George Bush and other legacy children being allowed into the best schools because of who their parents are, and knocking other kids out? I would guess he has not. I’ve certainly never heard him bring it up. Rachel should have called him on that one if he'd let her get a word in to do it.

When asked if she got the grades she did in college because of affirmative action, saying that in the Ivy League schools, half the kids graduate cum laude now. Really? So they're raising students' grade point averages in college now and no one told the rest of us about it? Then retreating to saying he bet he graduated higher in his high school class than she did, and going so far as to say he probably did better than she did in college as well, but he doesn't think he's qualified to be on the Supreme Court.

So being a judge for seventeen years doesn't count for anything in Pat's world. And Pat says he did better than she did in school, without backing that up with any specifics. If anyone knows just what his grade point averages were in high school and college, I'd like to find out.

He compared the track team at the Olympics potentially being all black or a hockey team being all white to the racial make up of the Supreme Court. Yeah, that's exactly the same thing, Pat. He seems to have forgotten that there was a time not all that long ago that blacks in America were not even allowed to play on the same team as white people.

And he refused to say there is anything wrong with the fact that the Supreme Court has been made up almost entirely of white men for all these years and might benefit from other races being represented. He dodged back opining over the firemen they trotted out there as a political game at the hearing rather than answer the question.

I really don't understand why Rachel felt the need to bring him on if she was going to let him lie and talk over her for the better part of the interview. She's just not aggressive enough to deal with the likes of this bully, and he knows it. MSNBC has allowed Buchanan to become a racist sideshow on their network. As Media Matters has wondered: What would Pat Buchanan have to say to get himself fired from MSNBC?

From The Daily Show:

Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court confirmation hearings are no snoozefest, as Republicans call her "racist" and Chuck Schumer cries.

Cenk takes apart Pat Buchanan's op-ed at Human Events on Sonia Sotomayor.

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One of the lighter moments from the Sonia Sotomayor hearings and just for fun here. Al actually did a very good job during the hearing and seemed to have the talking heads a bit astounded that he could be serious and ask some good questions, as well as funny. As long as Al continues to add this sort of humor along with his wonkiness to the debate on the Senate floor, or during hearings, I'm sure he'll manage to keep the talking heads flummoxed, or at least pretending to be. Anyone who's actually followed his biography should not be surprised by the fact that he probably just raised the collective IQ of the Senate by a few points the minute he was sworn in.

FRANKEN: OK. I -- we're going to have a round two, so I'll ask you some more questions there. What was the one case in "Perry Mason" that Berger won?

SOTOMAYOR: There -- I wish I remembered the name of the episode, but I don't. I just was always struck that there was only one case where his client was actually guilty.

FRANKEN: And you don't remember that case?

SOTOMAYOR: I know that I should remember the name of it, but I haven't looked at the episode. I...

FRANKEN: Didn't the White House prepare you for that?

SOTOMAYOR: You're right, but I was spending a lot of time on reviewing cases. No, sir. But I do have that stark memory because, like you, I watched it all of the time, every week as well. I just couldn't interest my mother, the nurse, and my brother, the doctor, to do it with me.

FRANKEN: Oh. Oh, OK. Well, I -- we -- our whole family watched it, and -- because there was no Internet at the time, you and I were watching at the same time. And I thank you, and I guess I'll talk to you in the follow-up.

SOTOMAYOR: Thank you.

LEAHY: Is the senator from Minnesota going to tell us which episode that was?

FRANKEN: I don't know. That's why I was asking. If I knew, I wouldn't have asked her.

LEAHY: All right. Well -- so, because of that, Judge, we will not hold your inability to answer the question against you.