The Day After Just-Us Sunday...

I'll beg your patience and understanding for yet another skimpy week, but in the meantime, please don't miss Thom Hartmann this week! He begins:

Why would a multi-multi-millionaire Senator, who consistently votes to harm the hungry and the poor who so concerned Jesus, join forces with religious fundamentalists to stack this nation's highest courts? Could it be because he and his wealthy Republican friends see huge financial benefits for themselves and their corporate patrons in a compliant court?

And gets better from there. Do read it! Kudos to Rev. Robert Edgar - if he was the first - for ingeniously renaming the "Justice Sunday" farce.

While it may be difficult for some in the reality-based community to understand how evangelicals can feel so "oppressed," it's not news to anyone who read Chris Smith's American Evangelicals: Embattled and Thriving, as I had to recently for one of my classes. Smith shows several other times over the last century-plus, when Evangelicals have launched similar campaigns - always designed to invigorate and animate members around a sense of oppression, marginalization, and disentitlement. It's the primary tactic through which they form a "sub-cultural identity"; it gives them meaning and determination. The evangelicals quite literally thrive on it, as Smith shows, and as their repeated use of the tactic demonstrates. (I don't have the book at hand in order to list the four previous episodes, but I'll try to add that later.) But it really does begin to strain credulity when the "oppressed minority" can be shown to have most of the Republican Party in their back pocket.

I'm beginning to quite literally thank God for Harry Reid. I wasn't sure what to think when Harry Reid became the Senate Minority Leader. But with each passing week I respect him even more. Via Daily Kos and AmericaBlog, Reid directly challenged Cheney's lies last week...

“In the span of three minutes, the vice president managed to reinvent 200 years of Senate history and ignore the fact that Congress has already approved 205 of this administration’s nominees. Apparently, a 95 percent confirmation rate is not enough for this president. He wants it all, even if it means shattering the checks and balances in our government in order to put radical judges on the bench.

“Last week, I met with the president and was encouraged when he told me he would not become involved in Republican efforts to break the Senate rules. Now, it appears he was not being honest, and that the White House is encouraging this raw abuse of power.

“It is disturbing that Republicans have so little respect for the separation of powers established by our founding fathers. Based on his comments last week, I had hoped that the president was prepared to join Democrats in taking up the work of the American people, but it is clear this is no longer the case. If the White House and Congress insists on proceeding down this road, Democrats will do all we can to ensure that Congress pursues an agenda the American people can be proud of.”

Here's a great post from Josh Marshall on the Republicans' sudden and desperate efforts to get the media to stop saying "nuclear option" (a piece of bait the LA Times has already bitten into). He's got more history here. And Atrios has an amusingly rich round-up of all the recent times Republicans used the phrase "nuclear option." If any other journalist falls for the Republican "that's what the Democrats want you to call it" line, then we've got more Jeff Gannon-like Pseudo-Journalists out there than we care to know.

Oh, and Via Chuck Currie... The theocrats are even planning to remove sitting judges. Read the whole frightening story.