The Political Whore

I’m starting a new Saturday feature to wrap up news and blog posts you might have missed during your busy week. Here’s a look at the Week in Review:

New book blasts sportswriters for ‘hysteria’ regarding steroids – Mitch Perry. The WMNF anchor writes about a new book that lays the blame for steroid-mania at the foot of writers who aren’t aggressive. “The writers, the supposed experts, watched over the last 20-30 years as steroids became a very, very common substance. And they didn’t see it.”

Economic report calls Florida “a state in trouble.” The single most depressing (and real) assessment of Florida’s economic shortcomings we’ve ever seen. A must-read. (The graph above is from the report.)

POTUS and the Pope — Peter Schweitzer. Our contributors asks: if the US bishops are sideways with Barack Obama over his abortion stance, why is the pope so warmly receiving him?

Shadowy 527 group unloads YouTube attack ad against governor candidate Alex Sink (video). A Gainesville GOP leader is the face of the anti-Sink political group.

Bankruptcy judge sets auction date for Creative Loafing alt-newspaper chain. It is likely that two groups will bid in late August for ownership of Creative Loafing, pitting the company’s current management against lender Atalaya.

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The Big Irony for Tuesday was watching the ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, one Jefferson B. Sessions III of Alabama, grill US Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor over her statements about the judiciary and race. (He ascended to the top GOP slot on the committee when Arlen Specter switched parties.) Sessions cited what he termed a history of statements that show she would not apply the rule of law but instead use her life experiences and racial politics to make decisions on the high court.

Sessions himself was the target of a similar grilling in 1986, when he was a nominee to the federal district court, according to this account in the conservative Black Political Thought/Hinterland Gazette:

Twenty-three years ago he was engaged in the fight of his life. He was appointed a U.S. attorney in Alabama in 1981 and was nominated to become a U.S. District judge by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. J. Gerald Hebert, a career Justice Department lawyer, testified that Sessions had once called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” He said that they “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” He sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as “un-American” when “they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions” in foreign policy. He is said to have made remarks that he thought the Ku Klux Klan wasn’t so bad until he found out that some of them smoked marijuana. He said these comments were made in jest. Right.

Sessions faced a heated round of questioning from Sen. Edward Kennedy, who called him “a throwback to a shameful era,” and our current Vice President, Joe Biden. How ironic. The committee held four hearings during one of which Sessions pleaded that “I am not a racist.” Hebert also testified that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a “disgrace to his race” for litigating voting rights cases. His nomination failed in committee on a 10 to 8 vote, with Specter joining the nominee’s original patron, Sen. Howell Heflin (D-Ala.) in dooming the nomination. In 1994, Sessions won a state attorney general’s race, and then won election to the Senate in 1996 after Heflin retired.

Talk about somebody who (it would seem) would be prejudiced against a process or person, having gone through what must have been a painful rejection by Democrats decades ago.

The Washington Post has a full transcript of the Sessions-Sotomayor interrogation.