Scott Farrell of The Farrell Files on 10 Connects and Joe Bardi of Creative Loafing’s Film & TV section were on board again this morning to tape the weekly HoCast, in which we examined the week’s top political stories, made sense out of them and played funny-sounding audio clips.
Here was our tentative show rundown as written before taping; we added the Tampa health care reform “near riot” to the top of the issues list and had some audio from the unpleasantness:
1. BIll Clinton (and Al Gore??) set free the journo-hostages from North Korea. The price? An unsmiling photo-op with an equally unsmiling and flaccid Kim Jong-Il plus some “face” for the North Koreans. Worth it or not? What happens next time a nation takes poeple hostage and we don’t send Slick Willy or a different ex-president to rescue them? Can you imagine the hilarity that would have ensued if we’d sent former President George W. Bush?!? And how long will Hillary stand for Bill upstaging her?
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 20, 2009, at 10:49 am
My guest co-host for this week’s HoCast is Seth Nelson, a Tampa lawyer who is running for the Tampa City Council in 2011 (for Linda Saul-Sena’s citywide seat; she is term-limited).
He is a former law clerk on the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, so we look at how Sonia Sotomayor did in explaining her statement about policy being made at the appellate court level. Plus, we discuss Walter Cronkite’s death and how it shows what is wrong with today’s news media and ask ourselves whether Barack Obama’s health care reform effort is in trouble.
And between all those headlines, Seth talks about why he’s running for the Council and what his top priorities are.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 18, 2009, at 6:30 am
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.”
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?
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jul. 14, 2009, at 11:50 am
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.
Posted by Mitch Perry on Jun. 8, 2009, at 11:44 am
Mitch Perry PoHo contributor Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio
The shocking assassination of late-term abortion doctor George Tiller on May 31 has brought back the volatile issue of abortion on to the national landscape.
Of course, it’s never gone away. But the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor by President Obama to the Supreme Court — and her relatively scant record on abortion issues — has elicited analysis that, perhaps unlike every previous Supreme Court nomination over the past few decades, her nomination won’t be heavily focused by her thoughts on Roe v. Wade.
Pro-choice advocates were stunned when Gallup reported last month that for the first time since it began asking the question, a majority of Americans now call themselves pro-life vs. pro-choice (although a review of other similar polls taken over the past year continue to reflect a majority pro-choice America.)
If that wasn’t at least a soft blow to those reproductive rights advocates, Tiller’s death by the hands of 51-year-old Scott P. Roeder absolutely was.
And for a portion of the public, upon learning of Tiller’s death, thoughts immediately turned to Bill O’Reilly, who focused relentlessly on the controversial doctor’s status as one of just a handful of M.D.’s in the country who continued to perform late term abortions.
Some liberal commentators and bloggers immediately blamed the cable news analyst for inciting Roeder to commit murder. O’Reilly, predictably, pushed back, and used the opening moments of his show last week to argue that his foils, NBC News and company, were just as responsible for the murder of U.S. soldier William Long in Arkansas by a Muslim convert.
For many in the abortion rights movement, Tiller’s death brought back the dark days of the 1990’s, when doctors David Gunn, Bernard Slepian and John Britton were killed for their work as abortion providers.
Sarasota resident Sherry Svekis received a late-term abortion from Tiller in 1985. Not being a regular Fox News viewer, she was unaware of the very public campaign O’Reilly had wrought against Tiller over the years until his death.
By Mitch Perry PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio
Last week, Lakeland State Senator Paula Dockery said she was seriously contemplating
a run for the Republican nomination for governor in 2010.
Apparently, she didn’t get the edict that party Chairman Jim Greer issued recently that all good Republicans should get behind Attorney General Bill McCollum’s candidacy.
But as far as Republican consultant (and soon to be PoHo contributor) Chris Ingram is concerned, Dockery’s possible entrance into the race is a good thing.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Jun. 1, 2009, at 1:28 pm
Sonia Sotomayor with her kids nephews at a ballgame. She certainly will have to be alert for foul balls in the confirmation process. (photo courtesy of whitehouse.gov)
This week’s podcast breaks down the Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination with Tampa media lawyer David Snyder. We talk about her race-based rulings, her temperament, Rush Limbaugh and Tom Tancredo’s charges of reverse racism and whether judges really do/should make policy or not.
By Kelly Cornelius PoHo contributor and R-LAND activist
Ever hear the saying don’t look a gift horse in the mouth? That is probably because horse’s teeth can tell you how old they are.
Being a horse person I am a strong believer in vetting before buying a horse which is also called a pre-purchase exam. Along with checking for any glaring unsoundness or other health issues it is a good way to see if your potential steed will hold up for the job you will be asking him or her to do. As you might expect, if you want a horse for light trail riding the pre-purchase bar might not be as high as, say, an Olympic jumper or even something in between.
Most vets will admit that while almost no horse “passes the vet;” there are just shades of failing. It still makes good sense to have a thorough exam performed. The only time it doesn’t make sense to vett a horse is if all you want the horse for is a lawn ornament. If you want a performance horse, however, you should know what you are buying and whether there is a reasonable assumption that your new steed can perform its job. So, before you take the plunge and buy old Dobbin, have him vet’ed.
I feel the same way about Supreme Court Justice nominees by the way. I think we can safely say they are well beyond trail horses and into the category of Olympic jumpers so the bar needs to be set very high. Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s hope for his sake Barack Obama’s vetting team asked Sonia Sotomayor if she has paid her taxes. Let’s hope they asked her if she’s ever hired, employed, otherwise used undocumented folks for laundry, housekeeping, garbage pickup, whatever. Also, she damn well have been kidding about the impact a judge’s ethnicity and sex have on the decision-making process. She better downplay her comment about a Latina woman (isn’t that redundant) making better decisions than a white male considering the folks asking her questions are predominantly white males, and old white males at that.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 27, 2009, at 9:40 am
Here’s an interesting idea from New American Media’s Roberto Lovato, writing in HuffPo about the Supreme Court confirmation process for Sonia Sotomayor:
Rather than allow herself to be put at the center of another racism and sexism-laden political circus around the qualifications of a candidate who brings more real-life prosecutorial and actual judicial experience than any other Supreme Court nominee in the last 100 years, Sotomayor should consider another strategy. She — and we — should instead view those hearings as nothing less than a trial to determine whether the GOP is ready to make restitution for its role in a number of judicial and political wrongdoings perpetrated in the Bush era. Those wrongdoings include unleashing unprecedented and dangerous political attacks on Latinos, and breaching the political and electoral contract the “new GOP” said it wanted with Latinos, one of the country’s most important voting blocs.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 27, 2009, at 6:25 am
The first shot in the confirmation battle over Sonia Sotomayor is out there, a video appearance by the judge at Duke University in which, ABC News reported, she said that the district appeals court is where “policy is made.”
If that is true, that would make her an “activist” judge, a label that is radioactive and would create a real problem for Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court.
So what did she say, exactly? And what did she mean?
The left-leaning Media Matters defends her and says her words were taken out of context, that ABC (and others) erred in their characterizations. That spin is being echoed by Democrats on this morning’s news shows. It goes like this:
In fact, Sotomayor was responding to a student who asked the panel to contrast the experiences of a district court clerkship and a circuit court clerkship. Sotomayor’s remarks from the Duke panel discussion … :
SOTOMAYOR: The saw is that if you’re going into academia, you’re going to teach, or as Judge Lucero just said, public interest law, all of the legal defense funds out there, they’re looking for people with court of appeals experience, because it is — court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know — and I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don’t make law, I know. OK, I know. I’m not promoting it, and I’m not advocating it, I’m — you know. OK. Having said that, the court of appeals is where, before the Supreme Court makes the final decision, the law is percolating — its interpretation, its application. And Judge Lucero is right. I often explain to people, when you’re on the district court, you’re looking to do justice in the individual case. So you are looking much more to the facts of the case than you are to the application of the law because the application of the law is non-precedential, so the facts control. On the court of appeals, you are looking to how the law is developing, so that it will then be applied to a broad class of cases. And so you’re always thinking about the ramifications of this ruling on the next step in the development of the law. You can make a choice and say, “I don’t care about the next step,” and sometimes we do. Or sometimes we say, “We’ll worry about that when we get to it” — look at what the Supreme Court just did. But the point is that that’s the differences — the practical differences in the two experiences are the district court is controlled chaos and not so controlled most of the time.
Watch the video clip after the jump, and you make the call:
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 26, 2009, at 10:19 am
Here’s a quick look at how the media — professional and otherwise — are treating this morning’s announcement of District Court of Appeal Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latina to be nominated to the highest court in the land.
[UPDATE: after the jump, I've added the Libertarian Party's blistering assessment of Sotomayor as an activist judge.]
Posted by David Warner on May. 1, 2009, at 1:25 am
National Public Radio’s intrepid Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg got there first on Thursday with the news that Justice David Souter, a mere youngster at 69 compared to some of the senior citizens on the highest bench, is nevertheless sick and tired of Washington D.C. and is headed back to New Hampshire at the end of the court’s current term. He’s confident, opines Totenberg, that the new prez will select a replacement in tune with Souter’s own moderate-to-liberal bent. She predicts Obama will pick a woman as Souter’s replacement, but says the choice won’t do much to change the court’s conservative bent.
Here was our tentative show rundown as written before taping; we added the Tampa health care reform “near riot” to the top of the issues list and had some audio from the unpleasantness:
