Another smoking gun…The Post obtains a memo showing that Justice Department lawyers generally agreed that the infamous DeLay redistricting in Texas violated the Voting Rights Act. “The memo, unanimously endorsed by six lawyers and two analysts in the department’s voting section, said the redistricting plan illegally diluted black and Hispanic voting power in two congressional districts. It also said the plan eliminated several other districts in which minorities had a substantial, though not necessarily decisive, influence in elections.” Nevertheless, higher-ups at John Ashcroft’s Justice Dept. overruled the memo for partisan reasons, to great effect: “The redistricting was approved in 2003, and Texas Republicans gained five seats in the U.S. House in the 2004 elections, solidifying GOP control of Congress.” As the illegalities pile up, one has to wonder: Is there any facet of the Republican operation that isn’t rotten to the core?
Scalito on the march.
“What can be made of this opportunity to advance the goals of bringing about the eventual overruling of Roe v. Wade and, in the meantime, of mitigating its effects?” He may be on the political back-burner until next month; nevertheless, Sam Alito’s nomination grows increasingly troubling, with word of another rabidly pro-life paper trail in his past which, like his conflicts of interest, he has heretofore failed to disclose.
The DeLay-Abramoff Job Farm.
The NYT examines yet another front in the widening Abramoff investigation: the quid pro quo hiring of GOP flunkies on K Street for legislative favors. “Investigators are said to be especially interested in how Tony C. Rudy, a former deputy chief of staff to Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, and Neil G. Volz, a former chief of staff to Representative Bob Ney of Ohio, obtained lobbying positions with big firms on K Street.“
The world has changed.
“The message in The Lord of the Rings is, in a way, that the struggle to destroy the evil also destroys the good. The very effort to mobilize against the evil unalterably changes what you’re trying to defend. So at the very end of that trilogy, the heroes — Frodo the Hobbit, Gandalf and Elrond — sail away. They can’t live in this world that they’ve created, because it’s so different from what they started out to defend. It’s a metaphor; Abraham Lincoln didn’t sail away, he was killed, but the world after the Civil War was not Lincoln’s America anymore.” By way of a friend in the program, Columbia’s Eric Foner picks his five most personally influential books, and guess what made the list…
Lying in a den in Bombay.
The consistently interesting Peter Weir chooses his next project: Shantaram, with Johnny Depp. “The story follows an Australian heroin addict who escapes a maximum-security prison and reinvents himself in India as a doctor in the slums of Bombay. His attempt to find medicine for his destitute patients leads him into counterfeiting, gunrunning and smuggling.” But will they be trying to tempt him, because he comes from the land of plenty?
Armstrong-Gate comes to Baghdad.
“Even as the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development pay contractors millions of dollars to help train journalists and promote a professional and independent Iraqi media, the Pentagon is paying millions more to the Lincoln Group for work that appears to violate fundamental principles of Western journalism.” According to today’s NYT and in keeping with the Dubya administration’s penchant for rigging the media, it appears the Pentagon has been paying for planted propaganda in Iraqi newspapers. “‘You show the world you’re not living by the principles you profess to believe in, and you lose all credibility.‘”
Eleventh-Hour Strategery.
“It is symptomatic of everything that’s gone wrong with this war that, after two and a half years of fighting it (and four years after starting to plan it), the White House is just now getting around to articulating a strategy for winning it.” Fred Kaplan surveys yesterday’s Dubya speech, one full of sound and fury about winning the war but, apparently, signifying nothing.
We’ll always have South Carolina.
Slate‘s John Dickerson and Bruce Reed try to disentangle Dubya and McCain, with Dickerson arguing McCain’s rationale for publicly supporting the prez and Reed explaining why Bush needs the mythical maverick.
Moore words.
“Watchmen’s whodunit plot was not allowed to kick into gear until late in the day and climaxes with Ozymandias spouting Postmodern art theory in his snowbound eyrie (“phosphor-dot swirls juxtapose; meanings coalesce from semiotic chaos before reverting to incoherence”). Even that old windbag the Silver Surfer might have hung his head in shame.” As its twentieth anniversary approaches, Critic Tom Shone revisits The Watchmen for Slate. Frankly, the piece begins and ends as almost a parody of the too-frequent needlessly contrarian Slate article: “The Watchmen is not as good as you remember!” Next up: “Torture good, Ice Cream bad!” Still, it’s worth reading regardless.
Ravens Aflight.
By way of Cliopatria, the folks at Crooked Timber have held another online sci-fi symposium akin to their earlier one on China Mieville’s Iron Council. This time the subject is Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and the respondents include John Quiggin, Maria Farrell, Belle Waring, John Holbo, Henry Farrell, and — finally — Susanna Clarke.