LET'S ASSAULT A FIRST BASE COACH FOR GOOD LUCK

I apologize to all the ginandtacos fans who have come to expect a consistent supply of political ranting from me at the exclusion of more banal topics, but I'm in the grip of a full-fledged White Sox fever this week. Symptoms include euphoria and repeated references to 1983.

I no longer live in Chicago, but I hope - and I can only hope - that everything South of Pilsen is shutting down at about 2:30 today so the entire sausage-loving portion of the population can be in front of their TV by the 3:00 first pitch.

"Sweep the leg, Johnny."

Fuck Boston. Fuck them and their fans and their stupid-ass movies about being a fan starring Jimmy Fallon. Not to mention Drew Barrymore. With Freddy Garcia (10-3 on the road) squaring off against Tim "The batting tee" Wakefield and his league-worst ERA, I can only implore the White Sox in the manner chosen by the head of the Cobra Kai in The Karate Kid: "Finish them.....finish them!"

Oh, and fuck the national media that can't seem to write stories about anything other than the Red Sox being poised to take the next three games to win the series. Fuck them right in the ear.

I wouldn't be able to look myself in the mirror if I didn't leave work early today. Fire up a polish in my honor, Chicago. I am with you in spirit.

EUGENICS: IT'S NOT JUST FOR NAZIS ANYMORE

(Berlin, 1941. A darkened office.)

Goebbels: "You know what would be neat?"
Himmler: "Killing Jews?"
Goebbels: (mildly irritated)"Yeah, but that's beside the point. Let's require some sort of state-approved license to allow people to reproduce!"
Himmler: "Good God.....you're a genius, man!"

(Exeunt)

Fast forward to Indiana, a middling state in the richest and most powerful nation on Earth in 2005.

(Indianapolis, 2005. A darkened office.)

Republican Senator Patricia Miller: "You know what would be neat?"
Staff: "Killing Jews?"
Republican Senator Patricia Miller: (mildly irritated)"Yeah, but that's beside the point. Let's require some sort of state-approved license to allow people to reproduce!"
Staff: "Good God.....you're a genius, man!"

(Exeunt)

Yes, welcome to George Bush's America, v2005. It seems that State Senator Patricia Miller, a woman after W's heart if I ever saw one, decided that unmarried people should require a "reproductive license" (I wish I was making this up) from their local probate court to pursue medical fertility treatment. Violators are subject to punishment for "Unauthorized reproduction," a Class B misdemeanor. The criminal penalties apply to women who become pregnant outside of marriage via "means other than sexual intercourse." Sperm donors, you're fired.

She doesn't look Asian, but she's learned a lot from Chinese social policy

While dozens of blogs have leapt on the main premise of this proposal, very few seem to have read all the way through it and grasped its full depravity. The definition of married couples that can receive fertility treatments is restricted to:

A Nice old fashioned ad about wartime destruction.

I was quite disappointed when I learned that the much-circulated Suicide Bomber VW Ad appeared to have been a professionally made spoof, not meant for actual release. I very much missed the thought of "How could anyone in a professional role have thought this would be a good idea?", which although one can get it easily enough by checking out current movie trailers or network television, is fun when it comes around in advertising. Luckily, I have a new favorite:

Click here (pdf) to see a large detailed image, and here for a story. Before you think that muslim groups are just too sensitive here, or the ad is being misinterpreted, evidently the sign on the side of the building in question translates as "Muhammad Mosque." Whoops.

When historians are pouring over the record to make sense of the first decade of this new millenium, in all it's Hobbesian misery of skyscraper infernos, flooded cities, Republican machine-building and unilateral militarism, I hope they take a quick peek at this ad. You can almost hear the *whack* of the back-slapping. It's not just the military-industrial nightmare of "Team Osprey." What's really interesting is the way religious imagery ("Heaven...Hell...from above"), the consumer hard-sell of a sports car ("faster...farther...quieter"), the marketing department design and the corporate-talk ("capabilities extended. Options multiplied") all unite in the destruction of a small mosque and its neighborhood. This mix, people of the future, makes up the air we breathe these days. Wake me up next decade.

And if anyone comes across this ad in a magazine, holler in the comments. I want a copy.

SOMEHOW, NOMINATING JEB WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE DIGNIFIED

Let's put today's utterly-puzzling nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court in historical context.

"Look, Harriet! It's some of the Evangelical dupes who rabidly support me!"

In fairness to the President, the Constitution (Article III, Section 1) lays out no formal requirements at all for serving on the Federal bench. In fact, not only is no judicial experience required but no legal experience is required. As late as 1954, there were Justices on the Court who had legal experience but had never set foot in a law school classroom (the last "country lawyer" was FDR appointee Robert H. Jackson). And appointing Presidential cronies is obviously not without precedent either. The controversial Court tenure of Abe Fortas in the late 1960s began when Lyndon Johnson decided to appoint the man who mounted the legal defense of his fraudulent Senate campaign (in which 200 mysterious Johnson votes were cast in alphabetical order as the polls closed) to the nation's highest court. Hugo Black was a Senator (not to mention a former Klansman) when FDR nominated him.

Certainly it is possible to deal with issues of Constitutional law at a very high level without having mountains of legal training - in fact, most professors of Constitutional Law are not lawyers but Political Scientists. I'm not going to argue that Harriet Miers is a baffling appointee because she has never been a judge. I will argue, however, that her utter lack of any apparent qualifications beyond "President Bush's confidant" is going to turn her hearings into a cluster-fuck of Borkian proportions.

I urge our readers to prove me wrong, but I'm almost certain that at no point in the last 100 years has someone been appointed to the Supreme Court without having previously done at least one of the following:

A) Served on the Bench at some level
B) Held elected office
C) Held appointed office (Senate-confirmed)

Even Fortas, the quintessential crony nomination, had held the Senate-confirmed appointed position of Undersecretary of the Interior under FDR. Miers is, for all intents and purposes, as qualified to hold a Supreme Court position as the most prominent lawyer on the courthouse square in every small town in America. She has done absolutely nothing except graduate law school and be Bush's pal. Her public service record consists of one term on the Dallas City Council and five years under Bush as the Texas Lottery Commissioner from 1995-2000. This reads like the resume of a junior State Legislature candidate - and one not likely to win a primary at that.

I cannot imagine what utility the President hoped to get out of this nomination. The political opposition will oppose it vehemently - and if he's going to piss off the other side, he might as well at least please his core supporters. But hardcore conservatives are as puzzled, disappointed, and irritated by this "buddy system" pick as their political counterparts (ask David Frum).

She's not young (60) so she's not a legacy pick. She doesn't please any of the key constituencies upon whom the GOP will be relying to maintain control of Congress in just a few short months. She doesn't mollify liberals. She doesn't do anything at all for the President except raise the possibility that the Democrats will foot-drag the nomination into 2006, a brilliant move that would force the Congressional GOP in tough re-election races to either give their party the finger or commit electoral suicide (or, as they say on the Hill, pulling a Mesvinsky).

In short, President Bush comes up with a new way to prove himself a retard every day. You'd think that the one thing he might be consistently able to accomplish is to keep the Cato-types happy. Apparently even that is beyond him. Or maybe it is simply that he has no principles or ideology at all - at least none that can't be overpowered by his commitment to back-slapping patronage politics.

If I'm James Dobson or any of the religious whackos that the GOP relied upon so heavily in 2004, I'm fire-breathing mad right now. You got used like cheap vending machine condoms, people. You've been salivating for this opportunity to "fix" the Supreme Court for a decade, and when the opportunity arose Bush decided it was far more important to give his politically-inert friend a gift appointment than to cater to the concerns of the constituency that put his retarded ass back in Washington for a second term.

Bush could easily have appointed a die-hard conservative in the Luttig/Alito mold and, with the substantial Senate majority, gotten a confirmation. He just didn't want to. This is a microcosm of what history will remember about George W. Bush in 50 years - he excelled at awarding government contracts and appointments to his hangers-on. Stocking FEMA with one's old frat buddies is one thing - he's about to find out that the Supreme Court is another.